One of the killer apps for augmented reality (AR) is allowing customers to see what a product will look like in one’s home, office, or other final location before it is actually bought. The IKEA catalog is perhaps the best example of this kind of AR application: point your phone at your empty living room and see how a particular piece of furniture will look in that spot. Likewise, SAI, makers of Flexi, the standard design platform for the sign industry, recently launched VirtualSign, an app that allows signmakers to see how a sign will look in an actual interior or exterior location. SAi had been teasing the app for the past couple of years and it finally launched in June.

“The idea came from our CEO [Mark Blundell] and he thought it would be really cool if people could see their sign with their phone before they actually printed it,” says Gudrun Bonte, Vice President of Product Management for SAi. “We looked into the technologies and thought, ‘That’s kind of an augmented reality approach.’”

The advantage of the app is that SAi customers’ design files already live in the cloud. “Most of our customers make their own designs in our software and we already have the ability for them to upload their files to their cloud account, so they’re stored in the cloud for other tools that we have,” she adds.