IKEA no longer photographs 75 percent of the furniture in its famous catalog. The Swedish retailer builds those images entirely on a computer, saving money and time on physical staging. Now, they are taking that digital foundation and letting you walk inside it.
The new IKEA VR Experience is a pilot app launched directly on Steam for the HTC Vive headset. It takes the familiar concept of wandering through a physical showroom and puts it right inside your home.
Three Life-Sized Rooms Powered by Unreal Engine
The app throws you directly into one of three real-world kitchen designs the moment you put on your headset. You are not just looking at a flat rendering on a computer screen. Because the application was built using Unreal Engine 4 from Epic Games, the lighting and textures feel very accurate to what you would find in a physical store. IKEA partnered with a French software company called Allegorithmic to make sure the wood grains, metal finishes, and reflective surfaces look completely convincing to the human eye.
Users can navigate the space naturally by walking around their actual room. The HTC Vive uses room-scale tracking to translate your physical steps into virtual movement with zero lag. You can reach out with the Vive motion controllers to open drawers, grab plates, or toss a frying pan onto the stove. It overlaps the virtual room onto your physical play space.
Here are the core actions you can take right now:
- Walk around the virtual floor plan using natural physical movement
- Open cabinets and pull out drawers to check interior storage space
- Interact with basic cooking tools and place them on countertops
- Swap the colors of your cabinet doors with a quick point and click
This marks a significant change in how consumers might plan their home renovations. You do not need to guess if a dark oak finish will make a space feel too cramped. You can simply apply the material and stand in the middle of the room to judge the feeling yourself.
What a Kitchen Looks Like From Three Feet Tall
Most adults know exactly where the counter hits their waist. But the IKEA VR Experience includes a brilliant feature that lets you shrink your perspective down to a child’s height of about 3.3 feet. You can also stretch yourself to the viewpoint of a very tall adult. This gives families a practical way to check if a kitchen layout is actually safe or functional for everyone living in the house.
Virtual reality is developing fast and in five to ten years it will be an integrated part of people’s lives. We see that virtual reality will play a major role in the future of our customers, for instance, it could be used to enable customers to try out various home furnishing solutions before buying them.
Jesper Brodin, Managing Director of IKEA of Sweden, noted in a recent statement that this technology is moving fast and will inevitably become integrated into our daily routines. The company sees this kind of spatial visualization as a vital tool for future shoppers. If you want to know if a heavy drawer will hit your toddler in the head when opened, you just shrink down and look.
It is a level of interactive empathy that physical showrooms simply cannot provide. You cannot easily view a real-world store from the exact eye level of your six-year-old without crawling on the floor. In the simulation, one button press changes your entire worldview, revealing blind spots and safety hazards in your renovation plan.
A Giant Testing Ground on the Steam Network
The Swedish furniture giant did not launch this software in a vacuum or host it on an obscure corporate website. By dropping the app onto Valve’s popular gaming platform, IKEA gained immediate access to the 125 million active users on Steam. This user base acts as a large global focus group for a company trying to figure out how regular shoppers respond to virtual reality tools.
Martin Enthed, IT Manager for IKEA Communications, stated they want the community to help them co-create and improve the software. They actively want gamers to try breaking the physics, opening the cabinets, and finding the flaws in the simulation. Feedback from this tech-savvy audience will directly influence how IKEA develops future retail software.
This release is technically a pilot program that is strictly timed. The company plans to run the test phase until the end of August 2016, at which point they will evaluate the feedback and decide what comes next.
To participate, you need some specific hardware at home. The barrier to entry is high because the software requires a powerful computer.
Requirements to run the pilot:
- An HTC Vive headset and two motion tracking controllers
- A PC capable of running high-end graphics in VR mode
- Enough physical floor space to use room-scale tracking safely
- An active Steam account to download the free application
The Future of Retail Showrooms is Digital
Physical stores have strict limits on square footage. Virtual reality enables retailers to build an endless aisle where they can display every color, texture, and configuration without paying for extra commercial real estate. Analysts are paying close attention to this shift. Researchers at Goldman Sachs recently noted that virtual environments allow for infinite layouts that physical showrooms simply cannot accommodate.
Investment money is pouring into this exact concept right now. In just the first two months of 2016 alone, venture capital firms dumped $1.1 billion into VR and AR startups. The goal is to capture the attention of early adopters and figure out what makes people pull out their wallets while wearing a headset. Brian Blau, Research Vice President at Gartner, pointed out that this move by IKEA proves the technology is finally expanding beyond gaming into mainstream retail channels.
| VR Industry Metric (2016) | Current Data |
|---|---|
| Venture Capital Investment (Jan-Feb) | $1.1 Billion |
| Projected Active VR Users Worldwide | 43 Million |
| Steam Platform Active Users | 125 Million |
While the headset requirement keeps the current audience relatively small, the projection is that 43 million people will be active VR users by the end of this year. Those users will eventually want to do more than shoot zombies. They will want to decorate their homes, test out paint colors, and redesign their living spaces without lifting a hammer. This pilot app is just the very beginning of a much larger shift in how we buy furniture.
The era of wandering through a crowded warehouse store to look at fake kitchens is far from over. Getting lost in the maze of furniture displays is part of the traditional brand experience.
But this software pilot proves that companies are actively building a parallel path for shoppers who want to plan renovations from home. When the #HTCVive headset drops in price over the coming years, testing out furniture layouts in your living room will become second nature. Until then, early adopters get to preview the future of #RetailTech from the comfort of their computer desks.
