Yesterday I’ve download Room Remix – AR Decor & Design app and today I’ve decided to check how good is it. I am not into those type of apps but I definitely understand their huge potential in helping customers visualize different items in their home before making a purchase online or from the store.
What is Room Remix?
Room Remix let you view real furniture and décor products in your home using augmented reality. Room Remix is an ARKit app, which means that it requires IOS 11.0 or later and online works with ARKit-enabled devices.
Room Remix Key Features:
- Visualize furniture and decor product using augmented reality.
- Link products to different online stores where you can order the product and get more information about them.
- Browse a catalog of product from a large variety of categories: Living Room, Bedroom, Kitchen & Dining, Office, Deck, Patio and Pool, Rugs & Flooring, Accents & Lighting, Entry Way & Utility Rooms and Seasonal Decor. Each main category has many sub-categories to to help you find exactly what you need.
- View the price of the product in the app itself
- Move and rotate the product.
- View how the product looks in real life-size.
- Capture a snapshot of the current view, shop for the products within the photo, and also share the photo with other people.
- The app can be used in both portrait or landscape mode
AR Experience
The AR experience was very good overall. It detected the surface really fast and I was able to just tap and put the item where I wanted it to I can easily move and rotate it using touch gestures.
My main problem with the app is that it’s very heavy. It took a long time to finally see the items in the catalog and even more waiting for the items to render on the screen. Sometimes it just shows a frame where the item will be drawn and it takes like 30 seconds until you see it. Sometimes you just don’t see anything, you click to place an item and nothing happens and you only get to see the item after some time.
It’s nothing to do with the AR accuracy or anything like that, I think it might be l related to the server location or server load. It’s not that the models have such a high polygon count that it takes a long time for the GPU to process them, i’m positive this is not the problem.
By the way, Room Remix isn’t right to a specific vendor. I saw a Capanagh mid-black adjustable height office chair form Wayfair and a Moroccan Trellis design area rug from Amazon, so there are various vendors which you can buy the products from. I don’t know if an aggregation is possible because I didn’t try to make any purchase or click the purchase button.
I run it on the iPhone 9.7-inch 2017 just so you know.
Conclusion
I need to try out similar apps like Housecraft Lifestyle and IKEA Place Lifestyle to see how those compare so I can compare the experience as well.
That being said, My experience with Room Remix wasn’t that good, but it wasn’t too bad either. The UI works really nice and it’s simple and intuitive to use. From some reason I wasn’t able to make the UI turn horizontally on my iPad, maybe it’s a bug.
There is a very nice selection of products from trusted online online brands and it’s certainly a valuable tool for those who want to pre-visualize the products before buying them.