Inspiration
Buying furniture is a guess. The measurements on a product page don't tell you whether you can still walk around the sofa, or whether it gets through the door. Sidle puts the piece in your space at real size so you can check before you buy.
What it does
Sidle is an AR Lens for Snap Spectacles.
- Place true-to-scale furniture (sofas, chairs, tables, beds) and walk around it.
- A live floor indicator turns green when there is at least 80 cm of clearance around the piece and red when it is too close to a wall, with a live gap number in cm.
- A door check tells you whether the piece fits through a standard 90 x 200 cm doorway.
- Add several pieces, then move and rotate them to compare layouts.
Who it's for: anyone about to buy furniture who wants to know it fits before it arrives.
How I built it
I wrote a design brief first, with numbered criteria, and every criterion has a LEAF test scenario that checks it in the Lens Studio preview. I built it with the CLAD plugin and the Lens Studio MCP, using the Spectacles Interaction Kit and UI Kit.
The Lens has two room modes:
- Stand-in: a virtual 7 x 8 m room with a doorway and a coffee table.
- Backdrop: Lens Studio's built-in "Colorful Home" preview scene as the room. Only walls count as obstacles, so a virtual sofa can be placed over a real one to compare.
What I learned
- Writing numbered criteria first, and a test for each one, made the work much easier to trust and to fix.
- In the Lens Studio preview, the background room only moves if the preview head moves, not just the Lens camera. To get a repeatable walkthrough, I record a camera path and replay it through the preview head with an editor script.
- Turning "does it collide?" into a clearance check that feels right to use takes real tuning, for example for the panel position and the walking speed in the demo.
Challenges
- Making the Colorful Home backdrop actually follow the camera, and keeping the demo smooth and repeatable.
- Keeping the model licences clean: I dropped one asset pack that had no licence.
What's next
Testing on physical Spectacles, where the same indicator would measure the user's actual room instead of a virtual one. This is not implemented yet.
Demo notes
- The video is recorded in the Lens Studio preview, not on real glasses.
- The walkthrough camera is driven by an automated script so the movement is repeatable.
- Code, design brief and tests: https://github.com/Sarmax04/Sidle-lens
Credits
- Furniture: Kirill Sannikov, Fran Calvente, Kuutti Siitonen and Aron Łyczek (CC0, via Poly Haven); Taha Arslan (CC0, via ShareTextures)
- Beds: Scopia Visual Interfaces Systems, s.l. (scopia.es), CC BY 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/), via Sweet Home 3D free models, converted to GLB and scaled
- Room: Lens Studio built-in "Colorful Home" preview scene
Built With
- ar
- clad
- claude
- leaf
- lens-studio
- lens-studio-mcp
- mcp
- snap-spectacles
- spectacles-interaction-kit
- spectacles-ui-kit
- typescript
