Monday, July 20, 2015

ONLINE SPECIAL ............................Virtual Reality Carves a Future in Online Furniture Space

Virtual Reality Carves a Future in Online Furniture Space


Companies are developing virtual or augmented reality applications to enhance shoppers' experience

Vijay, who runs a technology training institute in Tumkur city near Bengaluru, barely manages to fit in his meals into his airtight schedule. So when the 31year-old decided to buy new sofa covers and curtains, he ordered a bunch online from Lamya & Tanya's Home Furnishing.
What happened next surprised him. The website asked him to send pictures of his sofa and the window frames where he planned to fit the curtains. “I sent them, just to see what they would do with it,“ said Vijay. The chosen curtains were superimposed on the window frames in pictures, and covers on the sofa. He instantly bought them. “The point is to make the customer purchase once and for all, and not depend on the `trial and error' or `gut feeling' method,“ said Mihir Patil, director at the startup that has tied up with more than 40 vendors.
It is this home-grown technology Patil expects will set his company apart from rivals. With furniture and home decor emerging as a significant segment, portals like Lamya & Tanya's and Urban Ladder are developing their own virtual or augmented reality applications or partnering with tech firms for solutions that can enhance the experience of buying furniture online.
Product visualisation firm Whodat helped develop an augmentedreality mobile app, `Living Spaces', for furniture portal Urban Ladder.
The app allows shoppers to view in real time virtual lifesize models of furniture in their homes.
“When I walk into an empty house, I can visualise how I want it to be exactly before I even buy it, all with the click of a button,“ said Sriram Ganesh, founder of Whodat.
Urban Ladder typically pays such tech nology partners on a retain er basis. “We may look to invest or even acquire one or two of them, but that's way into the future,“ said Rajiv Srivatsa, founder & COO at the online furniture store. In August, Urban Ladder launched `UL Labs', an initiative for digital startups to develop virtual reality technology for them. Digital furniture marketplace Pepperfry has developed a visualisation tool for users. Homelane recently launched Kaleido, a virtual reality device that it gives free to customers to `try' furnishing options.
Virtual reality will allow you to see a panoramic view of a modular kitchen, for instance, and augmented reality will allow you to place that kitchen within your home to see how well it fits with the rest of the background, said Srikanth Iyer, cofounder and CEO of Homelane.(Additional inputs by Payal Ganguly in Hyderabad)
Malavika Murali

ET3JUL15

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