With the evolution of technology, new opportunities for visualization and modeling have emerged, particularly, due to the progress in the augmented reality (AR) department. Creating premises for a unique customer experience, particularly, the opportunity to tailor the model of an interior design specifically to the tastes and requirements of every single buyer, AR offers a plethora of options for creating a nuanced and intricate model that reflects the specifics of the target setting while also simplifying it to the required extent. Moreover, the incorporation of AR serves to introduce customers to a unique aesthetic of the selected design options, therefore, allowing them to choose the interior design that reflects their preferences and perceptions in the most accurate way possible (Sandu and Scarlat 6). Due to the chance to enhance customer experiences and increase the accuracy of the interior design process, AR must be considered an essential part of the framework for creating interior design.
When considering the advantages of AR in interior design, one should address the ample visualization opportunities first. Owing to the opportunity to recreate the target setting impeccably and introduce new objects into it seamlessly, AR provides perfect opportunities for the visualization of the key changes to be made to the interior of a house (Riedlinger et al. 23). Specifically, the visualization options offer the target audience a unique chance to interact with the newly introduced elements, thus, completing the illusion of a physical and spatial change in the target setting.
The use of AR in interior design, particularly, the option of building a 3-D model, allows understanding the relationships between the current setting and the items proposed to be introduced into it significantly better. Owing to the homogeneity of the elements within an AR design, as well as its close resemblance to reality, it provides an option of experiencing the change to the fullest extent possible (Riedlinger et al. 23). Specifically, the opportunity to change specific aspects of the new interior elements, including a chance to manipulate the color, size, and material of the items introduced to the interior of a specific space can be deemed as one of the most important aspects of AR in the selected context. Integrating new elements into the target setting seamlessly, an AR provides an authentic and fully immersive experience that allows a person using it to evaluate the proposed change aesthetically, determine the spatial advantages and disadvantages that it will entail, and sasses other vital aspects of integrating a new item into the interior (Riedlinger et al. 23). Therefore, AR represents a crucial opportunity of visualizing the key aspects of the proposed change, therefore, providing the audience with a clear understanding of how the change in question will factor into the setting of their choice and what functions it will perform in the environment in question.
Moreover, the fact that AR offers several visualization opportunities makes the specified tool even more valuable for improving the interior design. Specifically, the current application of AR suggests the integration of the technologies of mapping the key items, filtering the environment, and rendering the result (Riedlinger et al. 23). Each of the described steps helps to visualize a new and improved setting better, ultimately representing the result that is nearly indistinguishable from the real-life outcome.
With the seamless introduction of 3D-based visualization into AR interior design, customers will be able to experience the suggested options for managing interior elements in an AR context. The described option will help prospective buyers to recognize the impact that the selected change will make on the interior design. As a result, customers will be able to evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of the change in question, therefore, having a much better idea of the impact that the change in question will bring into the interior design (Riedlinger et al. 23). Therefore, the inclusion of AR into the development of interior design is critical since it will allow customers to experience the change.
Another essential point to make when discussing the role of AR in the context of interior design is the extensive and quite numerous range of opportunities for experts to collaborate on the project. Moreover, the use of SAR allows for enhancing the cooperation between designers to an even greater extent by removing a substantial amount of guesswork from the process. Specifically, due to the opportunity for the customer to introduce precise and detailed instructions regarding how the interior should look, the process of cooperation boils down to determining the best solutions to the set tasks and utilizing the available resources to complete the required objectives to reach key milestones and, eventually, create a complete and cohesive result aligning with the customer’s vision (Chang et al. 105). Indeed, as established previously when considering the nuances of AR in interior design, the application of AR allows maximizing the precision of the design request and establishing accurate requirements for designers to meet. Therefore, the process of collaboration no longer includes guesswork and eyeballing the key measurements and possible outcomes; instead, it becomes a series of consistent and condensed efforts to meet the set goals within the required deadline (Chang et al. 105). For this reason, the integration of AR is truly worth the expenses and the related challenges.
Additionally, as a tool for enhancing collaboration, AR can also be used to ensure that a strong communication channel between a company and its customers is established. Thus, vital feedback can be received at the earliest stages of planning and implementation, allowing the organization to produce the outcome that will meet the target audience’s demands completely. As Shin et al. explain, “We build on ethnographic studies of people’s homes that indicate differences between design for professionals and use in households, as domestic life is not characterized by a shared objective but by a diverse range of contrasting interests” (3). Therefore, integrating a personal perspective of a customer is vital in developing a design that aligns with the latter’s perceptions and philosophy. With the specified concept in mind, one can create an interior design in which a customer will feel comfortable and safe due to the compatibility of the cultural perspectives and the related idea of an interior design. Specifically, certain cultural signifiers, being the symbols of a language that speaks to a particular audience, will become eths shorthand for rendering the ideas of comfort, contemplation, and relaxation, as well as other characteristics of the interior of a target setting (Chang et al. 105). Therefore, the focus on collaboration between an interior designer and a customer is vital.
In turn, the use of AR will provide major opportunities for facilitating the collaboration in question. Allowing the customer to track down the changes to be made to the interior, as well as to be planted into the newly redesigned setting, AR will provide a customer with an understanding of a designer’s interpretation of the key idea. Moreover, the AR tool will help a customer communicate the key feedback and introduce suggestions concerning future change, therefore, contributing to building the setting that will reflect the buyer’s specific needs and demands for the interior design.
Therefore, by integrating opportunities for consistent communication and active sharing of information and opinions, as well as receiving feedback from a customer, AR gives designers a chance to improve the quality of the result significantly. Consequently, collaboration options represent another advantage that AR provides regarding the management of the interior design process. Incorporating AR into the specified industry will allow building a communication channel for the immediate exchange of information, including key data and feedback from customers, essential information about the target market and its trends, and vital updates from employees concerning the planning, implementation, and assessment of the interior design. The described opportunities allow refining the result to the point where it meets all of the customers’ requirements and represents an impeccable outcome.
Finally, when talking about the opportunities that AR has introduced into interior design, one must discuss the opportunity for making the available design options for customers easy to understand and select. Incorporating tools other than AR into the interior design for communicating with customers and allowing them to make a specific design choice, experts would often face the issue of clients selecting solutions that were incompatible with the existing layout and the relevant factors determining the partial characteristics and other specifics of a certain place (Sandu and Scarlat 8). As a result, the process s of drafting the design and polishing the ideas that customers produced would take a substantial amount of time (Sandu and Scarlat 10). As a result, the deadlines would shift, affecting the overall quality of the result and the ultimate level of customer satisfaction with the solution (Sandu and Scarlat 11). Therefore, even with collaboration between experts and clients, the absence of a clear perspective and at least a moderate understanding of design, and principles would affect the outcomes of the project to a noticeable degree.
However, with the incorporation of the AR tool as the means of assisting customers with the choice of their preferred design options, the process of selecting the available options has been significantly simplified (Jessen et al. 87). As a result, customers are provided with a greater range of tools for shaping their design while having a better grasp of how their idea would work in the context of an actual room and its key spatial characteristics (Jessen et al. 87). Although the simplified design selection opportunities do not negate the need to consult experts and negotiate the general design idea with them, AR contributes to greater involvement of customers into the process of interior design (Jessen et al. 91). Consequently, the target audience can take a more active part in selecting the interior design and discussing it with the experts while maintaining comparatively realistic expectations of how the specified design choices can factor into a specific setting. Moreover, the specified opportunity can help customers define whether the interior design option that they wish to implement is viable. Thus, a range of misunderstandings and conflicts can be avoided, with the length of a project being cut to a notable extent, causing the number of expenses to shrink.
Nevertheless, one could argue that the focus on simplifying the interior design and the related concepts, which AI provides, may work to the detriment of the project and the customer’s understanding of how the design can be implemented. Indeed, by avoiding including multiple nuances in the unique relationships between the elements of the interior design, as well as providing only a general picture of how the selected options will work in reality, AI may appear to be somewhat misleading. Specifically, the simplified interpretation of a certain design choice may entail a misconception about its function in the context of an actual interior. However, Fu et al. clarify that the described issue should be seen as an exception rather than a general rule: “Thus, it is easier for designers, clients, and other participants to involve in the design review process, find potential design defects from different perspectives and minimize the risk of misinterpretation” (p. 431). For this reason, the integration of AR should be regarded as a necessary step toward improving the quality of interior design solutions. Minimizing the risks of misunderstanding by offering customers a full-size model of the interior instead of a minimized one, which physical modeling suggests, allows clients to see the elements of the design interact and function to create a complete set with a unique atmosphere. As a result, one can spot inconsistencies between the chosen design options and the current plan, allowing for prompt revisions and the introduction of the necessary corrections.
Thus, the use of a hypothetical interior design that AR provides assists in introducing modifications to the design choices on site, which leads to more effective implementation of the project and t a greater opportunity to tailor the interior design to the specific needs and requirements of the customer. Moreover, the compatibility of the recently introduced changes with the rest of the design will become an option. The specified characteristics of AR as a part of the interior design toolkit bear particularly strong importance when a project that is being implemented takes an especially long time to be completed, with multiple changes being introduced. As a result, to ensure that the customer has a proper and accurate understanding of the project status and the outcomes that the new alterations will have on it, one needs to deploy AR as a shorthand for demonstrating the key issues and possible results. Therefore, the use of AR enables customers to develop greater agency in the management of the interior design process and are provided with full control over it. At the same time, the described effects of integrating AR into the interior design do not work to the detriment of the project since the AR provides a chance to educate the customer about the basics of interior design in a subtle yet effective manner. As a result, most of the propositions made by the client are likely to be reasonable and implementable.
Eventually, the sense of participation in the process of interior design, which AR provides, increases the level of customer satisfaction with the project outcomes. Indeed, studies prove that the extent of customer participation in a project and the range of opportunities for selecting interior design options with a clear understanding of how these choices will affect the general outcome led to a significant rise in overall satisfaction rates (Carlson et al. 7). Specifically, Carlson et al. clarify that in a recent study’s findings, “entitativity value was a particularly strong outcome of CP which in turn, was the strongest driver on brand relationship performance,” entitativity being the phenomenon of customers being perceived as essential entities in decision-making (8). Therefore, providing extra opportunities for customer participation is vital for facilitating positive project outcomes. Specifically, the introduction of opportunities for customers to become active agents in the process of developing the interior design creates a chance to enhance the sense of contribution to the project in target audiences. As a result, customers are less likely to perceive the project results negatively since they will see the interior design result in a s a product of their collaboration with the team and, therefore, will be generally inclined to view the design implementation in a favorable light.
In turn, since AR provides ample chances of increasing the sense of participation and contribution to active decision-making, it needs to be seen as a vital tool in promoting higher customer satisfaction rates and, ultimately, customers’ sense of being content with the project outcomes. At this point, it should be noted that the specified idea does not suggest using AR as a manipulative tool in shaping the client’s perception of a project n in an attempt at concealing its flaws. Rather, the integration of AR into the framework of interior design management and its further use as the means of keeping customers invested in the project should be seen as an opportunity for the target audience to gain a proper understanding of specific design choices and, therefore, appreciate the elegant solutions to the issues that the interior design team has been facing throughout the project. Namely, the solutions that would be seen as rather unusual and even accidental to a side observer will become quite obvious and reasonable to the client who has been participating in shaping the project by using respective AR tools and, thus, gaining an understanding of the functional aspects of each design choice. As a result, the alignment between the form and function, namely, the aesthetic aspect of the interior design and its practical use, will become apparent to a customer.
The opportunities for enhancing customer experience that the current AR options provide coupled with increased precision of AR modeling create the grounds for making SAR a vital tool for interior design creation and the management of the process. Therefore, AR must be integrated into the target context so that clients could keep the track of the interior design progress and so that experts could continue communicating freely and introducing necessary changes to the selected solutions promptly. As a result, the outcome of the interior design is likely to be both functional, aesthetically pleasing, and in alignment with the customer’s requirements.
Serving not merely as a tool for modeling interior design and demonstrating the available options to customers but also as a device for increasing collaboration between clients and designers, AR helps educate customers about the essentials of interior design. Consequently, customers can participate in shaping the appearance of the target environment without affecting the project adversely. Thus, the integration of AR into interior design is likely to cause greater levels of customer satisfaction due to the sense of the key demands being fulfilled.
Works Cited
Chang, Yuh-Shihng, et al. “Applying Mobile Augmented Reality (AR) to Teach Interior Design Students in Layout Plans: Evaluation of Learning Effectiveness Based on the ARCS Model of Learning Motivation Theory.” Sensors, vol. 20, no. 1, 2020, p. 105.
Fu, Meiqing, and Rui Liu. “The Application of Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality in Dealing with Project Schedule Risks.” Proceedings of the Construction Research Congress. 2018, pp. 429-438.
Jessen, Alexander, et al. “The Playground Effect: How Augmented Reality Drives Creative Customer Engagement.” Journal of Business Research, vol. 116, 2020, pp. 85-98.
Riedlinger, Urs, Leif Oppermann, and Wolfgang Prinz. “Tango vs. HoloLens: A Comparison of Collaborative Indoor AR Visualisations Using Hand-Held and Hands-Free Devices.” Multimodal Technologies and Interaction, vol. 3, no. 2, 2019, p. 23.
Sandu, Mihai, and Ileana Simona Scarlat. “Augmented Reality Uses in Interior Design.” Informatica Economica, vol. 22, no. 3, 2018, pp. 5-13.
Shin, Joon Gi, Gary Ng, and Daniel Saakes. “Couples Designing Their Living Room Together: A Study with Collaborative Handheld Augmented Reality.” Proceedings of the 9th Augmented Human International Conference. 2018, pp. 1-9.