Pinterest adds augmented reality furniture shopping to its app

Pinterest is expanding its augmented reality “try on” feature to home furniture. With the update, users will be able to preview how furniture and other home decor will look in their space.

The company has teamed up with major retailers, including Wayfair, Crate & Barrel, Macy’s and Target, which have made more than 20,000 products to the service. And, like Pinterest’s earlier AR try-on features for beauty products, the new furniture pins are shoppable, so users can buy the items they are trying out.

Pinterest isn’t the first to use augmented reality for furniture shopping — Ikea introduced an AR-powered app in 2017 — the app is also able to recommend specific items based on your previous searches and pins you’ve saved. “Home decor and redesigning and planning for the future is one of the main things people come to Pinterest for,” says Jeremy King, Pinterest’s head of engineering.

While the new pins have an obvious benefit to retailers, King says the platform’s creators are also interested in the feature. Pinterest has been leaning into creator-centric features over the last year, and while AR shopping isn’t explicitly a creator tool, it gives the app’s lifestyle influencers another avenue to create (potentially monetizable) content.

And while the company has had shoppable AR for beauty products for years, the addition of furniture will vastly expand the number of shoppable pins with “try on” enabled, from 14,000 beauty pins to 80,000 home decor pins.

In addition to boosting Pinterest’s commerce features, having a catalog of shoppable AR objects would seem to make the service well-positioned for an eventual metaverse play, should one ever materialize. “We're definitely watching it,” King says of the metaverse. “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.”