Dyson turns your vacuum into an AR chore tracker

Vacuuming your living room usually feels like a guessing game: you trace over the same spot three times while completely missing the dust bunnies under the credenza.

Dyson wants to turn that chore into a game of Splatoon. On April 11, the company unveiled CleanTrace, a new augmented reality feature that visually paints over your floors on your phone's screen to show where you have cleaned and which spots you missed.

The tool is slated to arrive this June as a free update to the Dyson mobile app. But getting it to work in your living room comes with a massive catch.

A very expensive game of real-world Splatoon

According to Dyson, the inspiration came straight from robot vacuums. The company says years of user cleaning data proved that humans are inherently haphazard cleaners, constantly overlapping the same areas while skipping others entirely.

To bridge that gap, CleanTrace uses the LiDAR scanner found on the iPhone 12 Pro, Pro Max, and newer Pro models. You clamp your iPhone directly onto the vacuum wand, look at the screen as you push, and watch your floor turn into a digital coverage map.

Here is the kicker: CleanTrace currently only works with Dyson's flagship $1,000 Gen5detect stick vacuum. On top of that, you will have to buy the custom phone clamp separately, and Dyson has not announced the pricing for that accessory yet.

AR peace of mind on top of green lasers

What makes this setup particularly amusing is that the Gen5detect already includes a built-in optical head that shines a green light across the floor to reveal hidden dust.

CleanTrace is basically offering an extra layer of psychological confirmation. Curiously, it remains unclear whether the app actually pulls any live suction or particle data from the vacuum itself. If it is merely using the iPhone's camera and LiDAR to track the cleaning head and paint the virtual overlay, there is no technical reason it couldn't work on older Dysons or any other vacuum on the market.

In fact, a capable AR developer could probably replicate the software in a weekend, leaving 3D printing enthusiasts to cook up their own phone clamps.

Why it matters

We think CleanTrace is a clever piece of gamification, but it also highlights the absurdity of luxury gadgetry.

For users, turning floor cleaning into an augmented reality progress bar is genuinely satisfying. It scratches an itch for anyone obsessed with making sure every square inch is clean. But asking customers to own a $1,000 vacuum, attach an expensive Pro iPhone to a vibrating stick, and buy a proprietary plastic clamp is a steep ask. For now, it is an over-engineered flex rather than a practical daily tool.

For the smart home industry, however, it points to where appliance interfaces are heading. Vacuum hardware has largely plateaued on raw suction and battery life. Bringing spatial computing into mundane physical chores gives high-end brands a fresh runway to differentiate themselves.

That said, strapping a heavy glass smartphone to an already hefty vacuum wand feels like an awkward transitional step. Until this spatial tracking is integrated directly into affordable heads or lightweight smart glasses, most people will likely try CleanTrace once for the novelty and never clamp their phone on again.