AR and e-commerce, before it was normal
We thought there was a missing step between seeing a product in your room and actually buying it.
Around 2021, AR was everywhere — but mostly as something you tried once.
Snapchat and Instagram had made AR filters normal. Apple had AR Quick Look, where a USDZ model could appear in your room straight from a link. Furniture, cosmetics, glasses, shoes — suddenly the phone could put a product in front of you instead of just showing you another photograph.
The part that was missing
The interesting part wasn’t the AR itself.
It was what happened after.
You could put a sofa in your room, walk around it, check the size, change the colour — and then what? The shopping experience still wanted you to leave the AR experience, go back to the store, find the product again and buy it.
We thought there was something worth building in that gap.
What we built
So we built ARhove.
The idea was simple: take a product from an online catalogue and let the shopper see it in their own space at its actual size. We wanted it to work on more than just the newest iPhone, too, so the MVP had two paths — depth sensors where the phone had them, and a different capture flow for devices that didn’t.
We built the mobile app, the product configuration tools and the 3D pipeline, and tested the whole thing with real stores.
It worked.
Whether anyone wanted it
The harder question was whether anyone actually needed it badly enough to pay for it.
Nobody did.
Some stores already had AR technology of their own, while for others the jump from “this is cool” to “this changes how I buy things” apparently wasn’t big enough.
What it was worth
So ARhove stayed an experiment rather than becoming a product.
Still, it was a useful one. We got to build the whole loop — from product data and 3D models to the actual fitting experience — and find out where the interesting technical problem ended and the commercial problem began.
