Amazon Spices Up Your Shopping Experience With ARKit
Some people love shopping in malls, but more than a few prefer to do it all online. Arguably the world's largest online retailer, Amazon, has just added augmented reality (AR) functionality to its shopping app. With the help of ARKit, you can identify books, furniture, decor items, and more. The app makes it possible to get an idea of how things might look in your room, so let's see how well it all comes together.
Amazon may have gotten its humble beginnings in books, but there's no question that the online retailer has gone way beyond that. You can shop for just about anything on Amazon, and usually find better prices than any other retailer.
With iOS 11, Amazon has stepped up the shopping experience. Now, you can use augmented reality (AR) to shop for everything from books to furniture, along with a lot of stuff in between.
Get started with the ARKit shopping experience by tapping the Camera Search button at the top right of the app's main screen. Then you can point your camera at whatever you want to shop for, and find that product or ones like it.
I started out with books, and Amazon quickly recognized the cover of one of my current favorites. It showed me the book I was scanning. That process was even faster and more accurate than scanning the title's ISBN.
Amazon even recognizes objects like chairs, and can show you choices based on what you've scanned a picture of.
The ARKit-fueled shopping app for almost anything
Next, you can play around with Amazon's AR stickers, which are really cool. The stickers allow you to select featured items and see how they will look in your space. There's a wide selection to choose from, including home decor items, office gadgets, Legos, and more.
You can resize items, which doesn't make a whole lot of sense unless you are really spatially oriented. It would be far better if the app showed those items with automatic size detection based on where you were placing them in your room. However, the current version doesn't scan your floor so may not get a sense of dimensions.
You cannot rotate items horizontally, unfortunately. This means that if you want to see how a chair is going to look in a corner, you need to be facing that corner the way you want the chair to be positioned. You can rotate things vertically, which seems strange to me.
Amazon's introduction of ARKit isn't flawless, but it's definitely useful. It allows you to get a rough idea of what a particular item is going to look like on your coffee table or in your living room, along with how office gadgets might spice up your desk. The Amazon app was already a great way to shop, and ARKit just makes it better.