Home Retail and the Future of Technology

29 Jan, 2019
Mark Strefford
AI

I was in Ikea with my young sons recently, and as we left we past a closed Toys’r’Us shop. The eldest aged 9 asked why it was closed and I explained how some companies failed to move with the times. Although only part of the reported reason, I’m sure that the likes of Amazon making shopping simpler and easier was a contributing factor. Why drive to an out of town retail park, queue in traffic, and have a limited selection of product when I could sit in the comfort of my own home and buy from my phone? My son was fascinated by this, even at his age he sees the ease of borrowing my phone and surfing for things he’d like. It made me think of Blockbuster too. When I was growing up it was the place to go for DVDs and games, I could even buy popcorn there, and then companies like Netflix made this experience simpler (maybe Netflix doesn’t do popcorn yet, although I’m sure UberEats or Deliveroo might!).

This got me thinking. I’d just spent at least 2 hours in a packed furniture store, in addition to over an hour in the car, looking for ideas and potential products that I perceive I’ll need in my upcoming house move and thought about how this experience could be made better for me, and what would happen to these large home retail companies if they also didn’t adapt. It’s no secret that it’s possible to buy furniture online now, and the likes of Pinterest and Instagram have many home-decor and interior design ideas posted on a daily basis. Yet for me what’s missing is how these items would look in my own home, and could emerging technologies like augmented and virtual reality make this experience better for me?

Imagine for a moment that you could see different themes for your living room, your kitchen, your bedroom, etc. Imagine being able to walk around a room and see it in many different styles, with different furniture and decor. Augmented and virtual reality makes this absolutely achievable, and I see a couple of ways this could br realised:

Augmented Reality

Improved processing power and dedicated embedded technologies in smart phones and tablets can be used to overlay a new design in your room as you walk around it (ok be careful not to fall over your existing dining table when you see a different one in your phone!). You’d not only get a view of how the styles would work in your room, but also a view of how big things actually are (sofas always look smaller in a showroom than in my home for example!). I can dynamically change the size that I want based on my room, not based on guessing from a list of standard sizes how they would look and fit. How would this paint look with the natural or artificial lighting in my room. Where I could put lights, and what type should I get, to lift the energy in the room?

And then at a click of a button I could order just what I see through my app, just as I imagined it. Ikea are already bringing this to life with their iOS app.

Virtual Reality

There may be times when augmented reality might not work. For example if your house isn’t built yet, your having extensive structural changes made such as an extension of removing or adding interior walls to change the layout, or have not moved in and all is available is a set of photos or artistic renderings. Or I might actually want to go and talk to an experienced interior designer and bounce ideas off them. This is how the retail superstores can add value. Take those pictures of your home-to-be, have that rendered in 3D in a virtual reality experience complete with expert interior designer. Try ideas out in virtual reality then go and see the real products, test them for comfort and quality. Although this is initially a virtual reality experience, it rapidly becomes a mixed reality experience as I can physically try products out.

I’ve seen demos of this before, some maybe 10 years ago now, but these were mostly walkthroughs on a 2D display.

Artificial Intelligence

No commentary on a possible future for retail is complete with discussing how artificial intelligence will fit in. The advent of technologies like GANs means that artificial intelligence has the potential to generate ideas on how a home could look. Although I agree this is not for everyone, some of us will still want to sit and talk through our interior design ideas with a real person, it could easily give us ideas on what could work and we could refine the ideas ourselves. The concept of training a model to apply designs from similar rooms is not beyond today’s possibilities, all it would need is a suitable dataset (of which Instagram and Pinterest could provide a basis). Imagine taking a picture of your room, and a model pulls out a variety of options based on your style preferences, the layout of the room, the colours you like, the lighting in the room, etc. Effectively this is your AI generated mood-board.

What’s possible now?

These technologies are being adopted by car manufacturers and other industries, and Brent Hoberman launched a startup in his post lastminute.com days looking to do something very similar with mydeco.com. However, the technology is becoming much more accessible now, and with the likes of Facebook throwing significant investment behind VR, it can only be a matter of time before there’s a significant (r)evolution in the way we shop for home furnishings. I would love to see many of the existing home retailers embrace these kinds of technologies, and my approach as always is to start small, learn and iterate. Only when you have confidence that the product is working, that users enjoy the experience and get fulfilment from it (emotionally and in terms of the products they buy) should you look to roll it out organisation wide.

Based on a quick Google search, I found a number of interesting companies working in this space. With the exception of Ikea’s iOS app, my search didn’t reveal any obvious traction from other major retailers in this space. If you know of any, please let me know!