Is TARDIS a direct Roomvo alternative?

Partly. Roomvo is a surface-visualization specialist — flooring, tile, and wallpaper — and it's excellent at that, live on 6,000+ sites. TARDIS overlaps on surfaces (paint, tile, wall coverings via in-camera retexturing) but also adds object AR for furniture and decor in the same embed. So it's a Roomvo alternative specifically for retailers whose catalog spans both objects and surfaces, or who want AR across the whole catalog rather than a curated set of prepared assets.

How is TARDIS different from Cylindo or Threekit for furniture AR?

Cylindo and Threekit build photorealistic 3D models and configurators, typically hand-modeled per SKU — category-leading fidelity, but with a per-product asset cost that suits a few hundred hero products. TARDIS auto-generates the 3D asset from a product photo, which lowers cost per SKU enough to cover a full catalog, and it also handles surface products in the same integration. If maximum single-model fidelity on a small hero set is the goal, the manual-3D vendors are strong; if catalog-wide coverage across objects and surfaces is the goal, that's TARDIS's focus.

Is TARDIS surface AR as accurate as a native app?

On the web it's preview-grade: color and pattern are accurate, so shoppers see the correct product in the correct place, but lighting and edge precision are below native app quality. Native-grade surface rendering is reserved for a premium iOS App Clip tier. Object AR uses the phone's native AR (AR Quick Look and Scene Viewer), which renders at true scale in the room.

Roomvo Alternative: Object + Surface AR in One Embed

If you sell things people put in rooms — sofas, rugs, paint, flooring, tile, wallpaper — you have probably already looked at AR for your product pages. The pitch is easy to believe because the numbers are real: Shopify reports products with 3D/AR content convert about 94% higher, and the case studies are hard to ignore. Wayfair's "View in Room" drove +92% conversion, +28% AOV, and -43% returns. IKEA Place reported +189% conversion, -20% returns, and 98% size accuracy. A 2025 Snap/Publicis study (n=4,028) found 80% of AR shoppers feel more confident and 66% are less likely to return an item they previewed.

So the question is rarely "should we do AR." It is "which platform, and what does it actually cover." If your shortlist starts with Roomvo, this is an honest map of the category — where Roomvo is strong, where the furniture-3D vendors fit, and the gap that a Roomvo alternative like TARDIS is built to close.

What Roomvo is actually great at

Roomvo is a surface-visualization specialist, and a good one. It is the default in flooring, tile, and wallpaper retail, live on 6,000+ sites, and shoppers know the interaction: upload a photo of your room, and the floor or wall re-textures with the product you're browsing. For a flooring retailer, that is exactly the decision the shopper is trying to make — "does this plank look right in my space" — and Roomvo answers it cleanly.

The trade-off is scope and asset economics. Roomvo covers surfaces: things that tile across a plane — flooring, wall coverings, rugs, countertops. It does not place a discrete 3D object (a chair, a lamp, a bookshelf) into your room. And the visual assets are produced per product — the pattern/material has to be prepared to render correctly. For a curated surface catalog that is manageable. For a broad, fast-moving catalog it becomes a content-operations line item.

What Cylindo and Threekit are actually great at

On the other side of the category sit the furniture-3D and product-configurator platforms — Cylindo and Threekit are the names you'll hear. These are strong where Roomvo isn't: objects. A photorealistic 3D sofa you can spin, reconfigure (fabric, legs, modules), and — via AR — drop into your living room at true scale. If you sell configurable furniture, this is category-leading tooling, and the configurator itself lifts conversion independent of AR.

The trade-off here is also asset economics, in a different form. Those 3D models are typically built manually, per SKU — modeled, textured, and QA'd by a 3D team or an outsourced pipeline. The output is beautiful; the input is time and money per product. That math works for a hero catalog of a few hundred configurable pieces. It gets expensive when you want AR across thousands of SKUs, or across a catalog that turns over every season.

The gap in the middle

Line those up and a pattern appears. Roomvo does surfaces well but not objects. Cylindo and Threekit do objects well but not surfaces. And both rely on manual, per-product asset creation — a specialist team preparing each material or modeling each SKU.

That leaves two real problems for a retailer whose catalog spans both categories — say a home store selling furniture and wallpaper, or paint and accent chairs:

Scope: you end up buying (and integrating, and paying for) two different tools to cover one product page experience.
Asset cost: whichever tool you choose, coverage is gated by how many assets a human can prepare. AR ends up on your top SKUs, not your catalog — which is exactly the long tail where shoppers are least sure and returns are highest.

Furniture returns alone are roughly a $30B/year problem in the US, and "up to -40% returns with AR/3D" is a widely cited industry figure. The value of AR scales with coverage. A tool that can only economically cover your top 5% of SKUs leaves most of that value on the table.

Where TARDIS fits

TARDIS is a newer, earlier-stage entrant, and we'll be straight about that — we don't have a wall of retail logos yet. What's different is the approach to the two problems above: scope and asset economics.

One embed, both modes. TARDIS is a single `