Dyson's new augmented reality kit could change vacuuming forever – here's how

Ever wondered how well (or how badly) you’ve cleaned your floors? Well, with Dyson’s new Augmented Reality (AR) tool, you can… but there’s a bit of a catch.

With spring cleaning in mind, Dyson has announced the Dyson CleanTrace, an AR-powered tool that’s designed to perfect your vacuuming. Following an in-depth study about cleaning behaviours conducted by Dyson, the results found that people habitually overestimate the time they spend cleaning and underestimate how thoroughly they clean their home.

Specifically, the data showed that around 80% of cleaning sessions lasted less than 10 minutes, while participants claimed they vacuum for an average of 24 minutes at a time. The study also found that many participants were inefficient in their cleaning, often missing areas in each room and going over the same area multiple times.

After you’ve vacuumed your entire house, it’s extremely irritating to see that you’ve missed a spot of dirt or dust. To ensure this doesn’t happen anymore, the Dyson CleanTrace is designed to help users clean better by providing real-time AR visuals to show where you’ve cleaned and where you’ve missed.

CleanTrace takes inspiration from the Dyson 360 Vis Nav robot vacuum and adds this technology to its newer cordless vacuum, the Dyson Gen5detect. With LiDAR technology (that the 360 Vis Nav uses), the DysonCleanTrace maps your room via your smartphone and uses AR to create cleaning pathways to show your cleaning progress.

So, what’s the catch? Well, the Dyson CleanTrace won’t be compatible with all of the best Dyson vacuum cleaners, but rather just the Dyson Gen5detect. One of the newer vacuums from Dyson, the Gen5detect isn’t cheap, with a price tag of £849.99, so if you don’t own it already, you can’t use the CleanTrace tool.

However, if you do own the Dyson Gen5detect, you can take full advantage of the Dyson CleanTrace and improve the vacuum’s cleaning across all floor types. But (yes, there’s another but) you’ll have to wait for a while until the CleanTrace AR tool will be available to use… and buy.

Yes, you read that right. The Dyson CleanTrace AR tool will cost you, and we don’t know how much yet. While it seems like a worthwhile tool that can definitely help with the cleanliness of your home, we’re unsure how many people will buy it, but we’ll just have to wait and see.