We admit it: we’ve cut little pictures furniture out of Ikea catalogs and held them up at arm’s length to see how it would look in a room. But the furniture retailer’s 2014 catalog makes it much easier to see just how their pieces would look in your home, no scissors required.

The augmented reality catalog works with your tablet or smartphone with the Ikea app. All you have to do is place the catalog on the floor in the place you imagine the new piece sitting. Then, use the app to select the product that you’d like to see there.

And then, hey-presto, you’ve got an augmented reality view of your room with your dream piece of Ikea furniture right there on your device’s screen. That way you can tell if the object you’re thinking of buying will look as amazing as you imagine or if it will ruin the look of the whole room.

“IKEAs research has shown that many of its customers suffer from “Square peg, round hole syndrome” as 14% say they’ve bought the wrong-sized furniture for their rooms and over 70% say they don’t really know how big their own homes are. Making the most of the available space is particularly important in the UK because it has the smallest houses in Western Europe, with the average house having shrunk to as little as 85 square metres.”

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“Our customers want to be able to test out whether the products they’ve been inspired by in our catalogue will work in their own homes – particularly when it comes to larger pieces of furniture,” said Peter Wright, country marketing manager of IKEA in the UK and Ireland. “Offering a way of using mobile technology to enable to test products means the technology has a practical purpose and really helps customers visualize the way their homes could look.”

There are only 90 pieces to choose from on the app currently, but it would be pretty amazing to eventually plan an entire home using this virtual window into the world of Swedish furniture.

The post Preview Ikea Furniture with the New Augmented Reality Catalog first appeared on Dornob.