Hilarious concept lets you preview your Hinge date in AR

Dating has come a long way since the old days. You know, when you had to like just meet someone somewhere out in the wild, or else be introduced by friends. First came newspaper classified and matchmakers, then dating apps that allow you to screen a person's interests and selfie-taking skills before you even consider meeting them.

A hilarious new AR concept now suggests taking that to its logical conclusion. By using augmented reality, it would allow you to view a preview of a potential date in your own living room and view them from all sides, presumable to ensure he or she matches the furniture (looking for ingenious apps that already exist? See our pick of the best VR apps and the best iPad Pro apps).

Dreamed up by engineer Josh Rozin and developed by Soren Iverson, the AR preview tool for the dating app Hinge would allow you to preview your date at home. Simply point your phone at the couch, table, chair or wall where you'd like to see them, move your phone to scan the surface, tap the bullseye and the potential match will appear in your home. You'll then be able to move and rotate them to view them from all angles.

Iverson says the feature is entirely possible and would "make hinge a little more unhinged. He says it's easier than you think to take a full body with a phone in order to make the renders possible. Meanwhile, he pulled the onboarding screen from the way Target handles its AR scanning onboarding. This design takes the idea of commoditizing people literally, but don't dating apps already do this to some extent? he asks.

"This is hilarious," one person commented on Twitter. "Nothing worse than a date that clashes with your furniture," someone else wrote. "Do another one where you edit them into your pictures, to see what pics together would look like," another person suggested. " Someone else recommended: "A better feature would be for your AR character to go on a date with their AR character, using @rizz_ai exclusively to converse." What is the world coming to, really?

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Joe is a regular freelance journalist and editor at Creative Bloq. He writes news, features and buying guides and keeps track of the best equipment and software for creatives, from video editing programs to monitors and accessories. A veteran news writer and photographer, he now works as a project manager at the London and Buenos Aires-based design, production and branding agency Hermana Creatives. There he manages a team of designers, photographers and video editors who specialise in producing visual content and design assets for the hospitality sector. He also dances Argentine tango.

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