ARki: Room Planner

A lot of positive and big changes have been made, now with house design you can build a model from scratch inside the app

This program has really made interior design easier for me, and I can also establish better communication with clients using this program

Not sure why everybody was so hard on this app. I think it works rather well and I can resize without any issues. However, I wish they had more to select from for fixtures in home decor but it’s a great start and I think it’s going to be a really really good product eventually in time just have to help these folks development

Seems awesome, but I can’t resize any of the miniature furniture to the full size. What is this? A house for ANTS!? Please make the resize button part of the double click menu, it’s impossible to resize things otherwise. With that in place, this app would be amazing. I can’t wait to use it.

Furniture looks gorgeous when placed in a room with you. Feels magical to try out a new layout of the room virtually like this. The UI is really clunky though. Tapping any of the toolbar buttons closes the current “document”, which is weird. The whole “design a minuature” vs “design at real scale” abstraction is weird, and a bit unintuitive; it only scales each individual model, rather than the whole sketch, and the button is unintuitive. And then importantly: moving things is hard, rotating is even harder, and saving is buggy. E g when I just made a sketch and reopened it, all the rotations had been reset so that everything faced the wrong way. And I wish it snapped things to walls and ceilings, not just floors… But all of these things can be fixed and polished, so please keep at it!

For the life of me, I cannot figure out how to get the furniture to scale, regardless of what I did and I follow instructions. As a UX designer, I find this to be very unusable, very limited functionality.

Pretty buggy, but huge potential. Shut down on me multiple times, and a little hard to position stuff, especially if you are trying to cover/replace an item in the room. But this has huge potential in being able to see your design before you start buying stuff.

Fun experience would like to see draw feature

I would give it 5 stars if I could apply more than one material without breaking my model apart. It can select and set materials at the element level but but won’t save and let you add different materials to other elements on that layer. Basically a layer is an entire import even though it lets you select different parts ……it is sooo close, closest app I’ve tried so far.

I purchased ARki to show my architecture students experiments with acoustic panel design. they fabricated a small array of panels (a 3x3 grid; 9 altogether) and designed a large array as a design proposal. we used ARki to visualize and experience this large array. overall, the AR was a success and an important part of the class. using the world anchor on the corner of a stand alone book shelf in our space, we were able to reliably load the model in the correct orientation. Texture mapping in the app worked very well and the layering feature, which we authored through Rhino, allowed for all class projects to be clicked through and compared. However, there are several aspects that need refinement: - the light or quasi sun-system needs options to turn off shadows and be able to define user defined altitude and azimuth. this is needed when you are doing AR indoors for object-scale and need lighting on your geometry not simulated sunlight. - the lighting angle should also save with the file so you don’t have to reset it on load. - loading is extremely slow for large geometry. a file that approaches 100 mb, the limit, will hand for more than 5 minutes as it loads even on the latest, quite powerful iPad Pro which we used. - the Ui needs back buttons. you can get into parts of the UI where you just can’t get back and need to force quit - finally, it is far too expensive in my opinion. TL;DR: good software. needs refinement and a price drop.