Pinterest's App Now Includes Augmented Reality Furniture Shopping

Pinterest’s augmented reality “try on” feature is now available for home furniture. Users will be able to see how furniture and other home décor will look in their space after installing the update.

Wayfair, Crate & Barrel, Macy’s, and Target are among the prominent merchants that have contributed more than 20,000 products to the service. The new furniture pins are now shoppable, similar to Pinterest’s prior AR try-on capabilities for beauty products. Users may buy the objects they’re trying on.

Pinterest isn’t the first company to employ augmented reality for furniture shopping; Ikea launched an AR-powered app in 2017. The app may also recommend specific items based on past searches and saved pins. Pinterest’s head of engineering, Jeremy King, believes that “home decor and redesigning and planning for the future is one of the main things people come to Pinterest for.”

While the new pins are beneficial to retailers, King claims the innovation is also appealing to the platform’s developers. While AR shopping isn’t officially a creator tool, it provides another way for Pinterest’s lifestyle influencers to generate (possibly monetizable) content.

While the company has offered shoppable AR for beauty products for years, the inclusion of furniture would substantially increase the amount of shoppable pins with “try on” enabled, going from 14,000 to 80,000 home decor pins.

A collection of shoppable AR items would appear to position Pinterest well for a future metaverse play, should one ever develop, in addition to enhancing Pinterest’s commerce functions. King said of the metaverse, “We’re definitely watching it. The good news is all this technology translates exactly into the metaverse. I think it’s on its way, but there’s not a lot of people shopping for physical objects yet in the metaverse.”