Visualising home improvements can be more difficult than it sounds. Often a new bathtub can look just the ticket in a carefully styled showroom but get it into your own bathroom and all of a sudden it’s hardly suitable.

To give shoppers a bit more of a clue as to how products will look in the context of their own home, American home ware giants, Lowe’s, have created the Holoroom, a home improvement simulator which applies augmented reality to provide homeowners with an immersive picture of a potential bathroom. Capabilities will expand to additional living spaces in the future, including the kitchen and outdoor living.

Shoppers first use an iPad app to give dimensions to a room. They can pick a floor plan that matches their own home, the colour palette, and then drag and drop objects around the room as desired. Once the shopper is happy with the set-up they then step into the Holoroom to see their arrangement in virtual reality.

This is not the first we’ve seen of new ways brands are helping the consumer to visualise their products out of the showroom. MADE.com created a website-cum-social network called Unboxed where customers upload photos of their MADE products in their homes and workplaces.