Wayfair Inc. is adding a new visualization tool to its flagship shopping app.
The home furnishings e-retailer is allowing consumers to place two-dimensional images of Wayfair products in their home via its app.
A consumer can access the feature, called “View in Room,” by tapping a button that appears underneath the product image in Wayfair’s iOS and Android shopping app. Once she taps the button, her smartphone camera launches and the product she is looking at appears on the device in the camera mode. The consumer can move the product around with her finger, making it bigger or smaller, and adjust the angle.
The feature enables a shopper to see how Wayfair products look in the context of her home.
She also can take a picture of the room with the image of the product in it, and then save it to her device or share the image via email, social media or text message.
“View in Room offers shoppers the added confidence that they’re making the right furniture and décor selections for their home,” says Steve Conine, Wayfair’s co-founder and co-chairman.
While consumers can see how the product looks with their home decor, the products are not to scale because the consumer adjusts the image herself.
About six Wayfair employees built the feature in about a month, Conine says. The web-only retailer built an algorithm that allows two-dimensional images to render on a consumer’ smartphone camera, Conine says.
The new features is essentially a scaled-down version of Wayfair’s more robust augmented reality app, WayfairView, which allows consumers to see to-scale 3-D product images in their home. That app, however, requires a special smartphone sensor, Google Tango, to work, and therefore is available on only a few devices. View In Room, conversely, can work on devices running on iOS 8 and later and Android 4.0.3 (ice cream sandwich) and up, Wayfair says.
“We want to bring new solutions to market that will immediately benefit all of our customers,” Conine says.
The e-retailer has recently debuted several innovative visualization tools, including two different virtual reality apps that work on two unique headsets.
Wayfair is No. 24 in the Internet Retailer 2016 Top 500 Guide.
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