Furnishing: a study of an IKEA trip.
Let’s face it: everyone was at an IKEA at some point of their life. Whether as a toddler (so not entirely voluntarily), a kid (more so) or an adult looking for cheap furniture. The magnetic allure of the Swedish furnishing giant invariably leads to a maze filled with sofas, chairs and fruit-scented candles.
Among many symbols of power Ikea possess (meatballs, bags, hot-dogs, you name it), there is one which exists in an apparent symbiosis with note & pencil: a paper ruler. Aside from letting you know whether a new pillow will fit onto your BEDDINGE, it also serves another purpose: to help you arrange the furniture into your flat. While making perfect sense, one vital piece of information is still missing: what is the exact size of the place you want to fit your sofa into?
While we usually know what the size of the place we wanted to buy a particular piece of furniture for is, sometimes we want to buy something spontaneously (being the perfect customer, in fact) or to see how that piece fits somewhere else. Unfortunately though, we rarely have accurate plans of our entire apartment (making Ikeas heart bleed). And even when we do, they are somewhere in BILLY rather than in our pocket.
There are multiple reasons for this state of affairs, but I won’t talk about them in this post (you can read about them in another post “Realtors and floor plans”). While most of those issues can sometimes be overcome, they usually don’t give a solution that can be used practically. Suppose one takes a picture of a precise, architectural plan. Although being exact down to an inch-level, they are hard to work with on your mobile device: it takes a large effort to take measurements on-the-go as you try to shop for different pieces of furniture.
Until recently, most of the home-planning apps were offering subpar performance comparing to classical solutions. This was mostly because they were not designed to work with obstructed corners, a scenario more than commonly met in real life. This led to measurements which were sometimes off by even half a meter (3 feet), making the plans unreliable.
At PanoRoom, we have overcome this problem by using a a simple & innovative way to mark walls. Our interface is both incredibly intuitive and allows high performance for power users. We believe that by getting to the edge posed by the technology itself we can give the customers accuracy they need.
Having created a plan in advance, which takes about ten minutes, it is possible to see if any bed, sofa or the night table will obediently fit into the corner we envision them to stand in. Rather than discussing the remembered dimension in terms of ells or different handspans one can just instantly see if the desired piece of furniture will just fit.
As a company, we hope that our app will help you in your next shopping. Whether you want to buy a used sofa from Craigslist, a new table from IKEA or a night table from a designer store you count on us to get the fitting part right. You can spend the saved time on eating IKEA buffet hotdogs, or chilling on a newly bought sofa. Enjoy!
