Periodic Reporting for period 1 - FURNIT-SAVER (Smart Augmented and Virtual Reality Marketplace for Furniture Customisation)
Okres sprawozdawczy: 2015-02-01 do 2016-03-31
These small companies have been unable to compete with the economies of scale advantages that larger retailers can offer. These scale advantages come from offering a wide range of standardised products and selling them to many people. These larger companies also tend to offer relatively cheap and impermanent products that can be replaced if they do not fit the customer's needs.
A potential competitive advantages for smaller furniture companies is the ability to provide customised goods that meet the customers' demands and are of greater quality and durability. However, as it is impossible to envisage how the furniture will look and fit into the customers home, customised furniture also bears an expensive risk if the final piece of furniture does not meet the customer's needs.
Recent developments in virtual and augmented reality technologies offer furniture SMEs the opportunity to remove these risks. Allowing the customers to see the customised furniture in their home environment and to adapt it to their own particular tastes and needs by using an automatic recommender system, will give creative SMEs a competitive advantage over larger companies.
The FURNIT-SAVER project will make use of VR/AR technologies, recommendation engines and a user interface to produce a smart marketplace for furniture customisation. It will enable customers to make accurate 3D plans of the rooms they wish to design, recommend, customise and visualise different furniture, before visualising it in their home environment using Augmented Reality.
• An improved web-based tool for the creation of virtualized environments based on automatic 3D rendering of 2D layouts where the user can replicate the space to be furnished by defining room edges and sizes as well as room elements such as doors and windows.
• A user-friendly web-based method to ingest scaled 3D furniture models and its different configurations and customization properties.
• A virtual reality environment providing an improved user experience through the access to 3D furniture models provided for manufacturersuse allowing custmers to customize several furniture attributes
• An Augmented Reality mobile app with access to the user’s created accommodations for a simulated visualization of the different selected furniture items in combination with the real world.
• A backend recommender service to provide personalized furniture recommendations using collaborative filtering based on furniture properties and experience from previous users.
• A low-cost 3D furniture service generation based on the integration of existing technologies for image acquisition and processing providing relatively low quality 3D models used as inclusive tool for non-digitize manufacturers.