If this had been announced exactly a week earlier, it would have been easy to mistake it for some corporate April Foolery. Dyson, however, assures us that the augmented reality vacuum cleaner is real, and it’s coming in June — unfortunately a little late for spring cleaning.
When it comes out in the summer, CleanTrace will be available for the Dyson Gen5detect system. The press photos understate the tech a bit, as it will be geared towards phones, rather than, say, Apple’s Vision Pro or Meta Quest headsets. While it seems like this kind of heads-up AR would be possible, one ultimately wonders how many people will want to vacuum with a computer on their head.
The system is a bit silly and overly redundant, but that’s kind of fun, no? It’s not going to sway anyone on the fence about a $700 super-premium vacuum, but this isn’t the most ridiculous thing Dyson has shown the world.
The company says the feature was influenced by its own robot vacuum mapping. “We realized we could all learn a thing or two from our robotic vacuum cleaners’ methodical approach to cleaning,” notes Dyson VP of Engineering, Charlie Park. “Unlike most people who do the cleaning, Dyson robots know where they are in the room, where they’ve been and where they haven’t been yet.”
In the demos, the system creates a purple (Dyson color) overlay, showing the path the vacuum has taken to that point. The goal is to turn the entire room in that color, to ensure you’ve hit all the spots, rather than just relying on your technologically outdated eyeballs.
As someone who vacuums almost every morning, I tend to believe Dyson when he notes: “Our research shows that consumers regularly overestimate the time they spend cleaning – data shows that around 80% of cleaning sessions last less than 10 minutes , yet people claim to blank for an average of 24 minutes per session.”
What this statement ultimately boils down to is that most people hate vacuuming because most people hate housework. As such, we tend to dramatically overestimate the amount of time we spend doing it each day. And hey, if CleanTrace can save some time and make the process more efficient, that’s great. If it eventually proves popular with users, you can vacuum gamification to be so far away?
