Natuzzi launches Augmented Store for VR furniture shopping
The Italian furniture brand Natuzzi has embarked on what it calls "a new era of advanced, white-glove customer service" by launching a virtual-reality shopping experience.
The brand's Augmented Store is part of its New York City Madison Avenue showroom. It enables customers to enter a digitally rendered version of their own home in virtual reality and decorate it with Natuzzi pieces.
Customers wear Microsoft's HoloLens 2 headset to interact with the environment, move products around, and change patterns and colours.
"It gives them a sense of place and mood that's almost as real as a physical furniture display, and the experience helps them form an emotional connection to their choices," creative director Pasquale Junior Natuzzi told Dezeen. Based on testing, the company predicts that the deep level of engagement afforded by the Augmented Store will help reduce the brand's closing ratio by at least one-third.
It also expects that the roll-out of more Augmented Stores, which it expects to have in every Natuzzi shop worldwide by the end of 2020, will mean its physical showrooms can carry less inventory, and consequently take up less square footage.
With the reduced cost and space requirements, it could mean an overall expansion in the number of stores.
A few furniture brands have experimented with augmented-reality (AR) shopping, mainly younger players such as Opendesk but also the retail giant IKEA.
Natuzzi's Augmented Store includes a similar AR experi...
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