System: Oculus Rift, Rift S
Price at Time Of Review: Free
Comfort Rating: Green (No Movement)
Genre: Art and Creation
Input: Gamepad, Oculus Touch
Best Playing Position: Sitting, Standing
Multi-Player: No
Age Rating: PG
Description: Wayfair’s Patio Playground invites you to escape to a summery retreat, complete with sunny skies, open air, and…drones? Watch your design dreams come to life as you explore, rearrange, and discover furniture and décor from our extensive catalog, materialized right in front of your eyes via trusty teleportation! Set against the backdrop of a lakeside scene, Patio Playground will immerse you in a relaxing, dynamic environment with a selection of vividly rendered products to inspire your inner decorator. Visualize design as you’ve never been able to before as you arrange and customize your finds in an array of colors and styles, from traditional to modern and more. What will you create?
Review: For those of us who don’t know the name, Wayfair is a bit like IKEA. Selling various bits of furniture they are what one might call a furniture store. The idea of this app is you play around with the various bits of furniture, then pop into the shop (or go online) and order them for your own real garden! With thousands of variations of colour and furniture, you should be able to design the perfect garden hangout.
Having the furniture beamed down by a magic drone is a great touch and the app interface is well-designed meaning you can grab, choose and change the colour of the piece of furniture you want pretty easily. I have to say I found it oddly therapeutic.
There is no denying that this is great marketing by the Wayfair marketing team and it is fun to play with. But this is just one of those apps that would be much better running in augmented reality rather than virtual reality. I would much rather see what I could fit in my own garden rather than someone else’s who seems to have more room than a local football team. But if you love garden designing, this could be the perfect app to get some ideas.
