VizeraLabs has a new projector that lets your preview furniture

Let’s say you’re at a furniture store and see a couch you like. It has the number of seats you need for your living room and the cushions are comfortable. But the model in the store is cotton, and that just won’t do — you wanted leather. How are you supposed to know if you like how it looks in person? At stores with Y Combinator-backed VizeraLabs’s projector installed, you can instantly see what every fabric looks like on a display model. The company wants to replace the books full of different fabrics you can look through at furniture retailers with a projector paired with Microsoft’s Kinect hardware and pretty much any device that can connect to its growing database of materials and patterns in the cloud. At least, that’s the idea. It’s not quite the same experience as being able to feel the material, and while it looks good from a few feet away, you’re not going to be fooled up close.