GrokStyle's visual search tech makes it into IKEA's Place AR app
Summary
GrokStyles simple concept of point your camera at a chair (or lamp, or table) and find others like it for sale attracted $2 million in funding last year, and the company has been putting that cash to work. And remarkably for a company trying to break into the home furnishing market, it landed furniture goliath IKEA as its first real customer; GrokStyles point-and-search functionality is being added to the IKEA Place AR app.What GrokStyle does, in case you dont remember, is identify any piece of furniture your camera can see in your house, at a store, in a catalog and immediately return similar pieces or even the exact one, with links to buy them.I remember being skeptical last year that the product could possibly work as well as they said it did. The growing team is led by Sean Bell and Kavita Bala, who spun GrokStyle out of their work on computer vision at Cornell University and its clear they know what theyre doing.IKEA thought so as well. He loved it.He just said, OK, this needs to be in the next release, recalled Bell, and in 3 months we were able to turn it around for them.It seemed as clear to Valdsgaard as it is to GrokStyle that the advent of mixed reality in all its forms necessitates a fundamentally different kind of search. GrokStyle could very easily have overshot to begin with and tried to offer consumers an app that categorizes and searches among your photos and others, but that way lies great cost and questionable utility.I originally thought that furniture was a rather prosaic and narrow field in which to deploy their obviously effective tech, but in fact it was a very wise choice.