Looking to see how that new 77-inch TV will fit in your rumpus room? Best Buy’s new Vision Pro app has you covered.

Released in April, the new Best Buy Envision app for Vision Pro offers up 3D preview models from a number of product categories, including TV & home theater, large kitchen appliances like fridges and freezers, computers & tablets, health & fitness stuff, and even furniture.

For now, you can’t actually buy stuff directly on the app; instead you’re given a hyperlink to the web-based store that you can then navigate and purchase on the full online store via Safari.

Image courtesy Best Buy

Even if you’re not looking to plonk down cash for a new toy or appliance right now, it’s a pretty cool way to preview a selection of accurately scaled stuff in-headset, albeit whittled down to a few manufacturers, such as LG, Bosch, Asus, Lenovo, Dell—and of course a ton of products from the company’s vertically integrated house brand, Insignia.

Granted, it’s not as extensive a selection as you can find on the company’s Best Buy mobile app, which features a lot more AR product previews using your smartphone’s camera, but it’s a pretty prescient look at what it could be like in the pretty near future.

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And besides giving you a more accurate way of placing digital products in your room, it’s also pretty interesting to see the retailer invest in creating a Vision Pro-native app where others deemed it too niche—we’re looking at you YouTube, Netflix, and Spotify.

While we’re still waiting on that XR-driven shopping revolution companies have been touting for years now, take at a look at Best Buy Envision is action to see just how close we’re getting, courtesy YouTuber ‘Kel.Vision’:

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Scott Hayden
Well before the first modern XR products hit the market, Scott recognized the potential of the technology and set out to understand and document its growth. He has been professionally reporting on the space for nearly a decade as Editor at Road to VR, authoring more than 4,000 articles on the topic. Scott brings that seasoned insight to his reporting from major industry events across the globe.
  • Nevets

    One of many mainstream uses for AR that will capture public interest… Once the hardware becomes small, comfortable and affordable. Exciting stuff.

  • Arno van Wingerde

    It is amazing that for instance Amazon does not offer this. They have the pictures and the sizes… OK some pictures may have to be redone, to get the angle background etc. right. I am sure there would initially wildly miss-scaled or misrepresented items, but they could simply start with what they have…

    • STL

      Amazon did. It was crap, as usually AR is, so far.

    • Christian Schildwaechter

      Amazon is now more platform than online seller, with most of the offers coming from vendors just using Amazon’s infrastructure. These also provide images, descriptions etc., leading to quite inconsistent information, but also making it harder to push everything in a certain direction. Many articles show the same pictures as sites like AliExpress, provided by the unknown manufacturer and used by dozens of companies selling rebranded versions. You’d pretty much have to go down the whole chain, with many at the end of the chain having serious problems to even write decipherable English.

      Bestbuy is still more of a traditional retailer, with much more controlled by the company, incl. presentation. The best positioned company for presenting products in AR is Ikea. Not only do they have a clearly defined set of products sold worldwide, usually modular to make transport easier. They also started using 3D renderings for their catalogue as early 2005, with 75% of the marketing photos now being CGI.

      Their primary reason was that shooting their typical kitchen or living room setups was insanely complex and expensive due many small cultural differences requiring separate shoots for different countries, elegantly solved by going digital while also gaining speed and flexibility. So they have precise high quality 3D models of all of their ~10K products, and experience in combining virtual and real images in a way their customers won’t even notice. They were one of the first to seriously use AR on mobile phones as a sales tool. Not yet at the level of Apple, who on their website now offer AR products views. And if you happen to look at one of them in AVP while in the virtual moon environment, it will not only float in space in front of yon, shaded according to the light up there. You’ll even see the reflection of the earth on the AR model when you rotate it.

  • Christian Schildwaechter

    And besides giving you a more accurate way of placing digital products in your room, it’s also pretty interesting to see the retailer invest in creating a Vision Pro-native app where others deemed it too niche—we’re looking at you YouTube, Netflix, and Spotify.

    Maybe the fact that Netflix competes with Apple TV, Spotify with Apple Music, and YouTube/YouTube Music with both Apple TV and Apple Music is somehow connected to them not only declaring AVP too niche to create apps for it, but also forcing them to actively disallow their existing iPad apps from being used on it, because reasons.

    And while Best Buy already knew from their iPhone app that people will actually use AR to check how things will work in their home before ordering them, how could YouTube/Netflix/Spotify know if people paying USD 3500 for an extremely high resolution microOLED HMD with spatial sound capable of rendering Dolby Atmos would even be interested in video or audio content? Best to first wait and see, and prevent users from prematurely trying it themselves by accident. I’m sure their legal or PR departments can explain why this makes perfect sense and only serves their customers.