Dive Brief:

• Wayfair announced View in Room, a new feature in its flagship mobile application that allows shoppers to see 2-D images furniture and décor in their homes through the camera on their phones before they buy the products.
• View in Room, available on Wayfair's app for iPhone and Android devices as well as the company's Joss & Main and AllModern mobile apps, taps into a library of more than six million images of Wayfair products.
• Wayfair, which also has been active in 3-D imaging, is additionally offering 3-D product rendering innovations in virtual and augmented reality on select virtual reality headsets and the Lenovo Tango-enabled Phab 2 Pro.

Dive Insight:

At least as much and arguably more than any other retailer, Wayfair has been aggressively playing with how images in both 2-D and 3-D (and in virtual reality and augmented reality contexts) can be used to promote merchandise in new ways. This is just the latest of several announcements in recent months that demonstrates that notion.

The retailer's Patio Playground VR application through the Oculus Rift headset was one of its first moves, followed by the release of Wayfair's application programming interface to its 3-D model library, a move designed to get developers to join Wayfair as it pushed further along its image modeling roadmap. The company last month also launched its IdeaSpace VR application, which allows customers to use the Google Daydream VR device to move through custom-designed virtual rooms.

IdeaSpace in some ways seems like a precursor, or at least a cousin, to View in Room. While the latter relies on 2-D images, it goes a step further than IdeaSpace by letting customers put Wayfair's product images into their own existing spaces.

Not a lot of retailers have yet to go very far deploying VR apps for marketing and promotional purposes, or even leveraging their catalogs of product images in such interesting ways. Wayfair's line of business, in which it certainly makes sense to do everything you can to help customers envision decor in their own homes, may be a more natural fit for these kinds of apps than most. However, it wouldn't hurt other retailers to take a closer look at Wayfair's recent announcements if they are looking for inspiration for how to incorporate more creative image apps and VR into their marketing and sale strategies.