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)
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Malavika Murali
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ET3JUL15
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