IKEA unveils app that can virtually empty space and fill it with furniture

IKEA comes with a new app to ‘try out’ furniture at home. The so-called Kreativ application is able to not only place virtual furniture in a room, but also to ‘erase out’ existing furniture.

With the option to remove existing furniture, creative away from the existing IKEA Place app† Yet the two apps exist side by side: Kreativ is not able to erase and post live at the same time. In Kreativ, users have to take a series of photos of their space, in which Kreativ will then do its work. Place works live, but does not erase.

The function is best known for its application in the Pixel 6 series of smartphones, but the technology is offered by several companies. Called it ‘the magic eraser’ by Google, it is able to remove highlighted objects from a photo using estimations of what the background behind it should look like. If the background is complex, it will show that the photo has been edited, but the result is generally acceptable.

The Kreativ app is coming to the US first, according to the Swedish furniture giant, for iOS and ‘laptop users’. Android will follow “soon” and “additional countries” will follow in fiscal year 2023, which runs for IKEA from September 2022 to August 2023. Ars Technica writes that “lidar-equipped iOS devices will work best, but other iOS devices are also supported.”

A demonstration of the underlying technology on a Google Pixel 6