LAS VEGAS— Pottery Barn has launched a 3D room design and visualization tool that taps into Google’s Tango technology, as parent company Williams-Sonoma prepares to offer virtual and augmented reality options to shoppers of its retail banners.
Gaurav Sethi, a founder of the technology partner that helped Williams-Sonoma develop its 3D/VR/AR capabilities, Outward, told HOMEWORLD BUSINESS® that the retailer has assembled a sophisticated image library that it has tapped for 2D graphics but that also can produce 3D images.
Outward has focused on home specialty retailers, with Williams-Sonoma among the first, to help create image resources that are more advanced and less costly in their 3D production than has been the case. It eventually plans to offer its technology to mass market retailers of home-related products to help them enhance their online marketing and merchandising with VR/AR technology.
Outward originally helped Williams-Sonoma improve its digital imagery, Sethi said. As it employed the technology, Williams-Sonoma built a large database of images that now allows for rendition of the data in a 3D format. What Outward has been able to provide, said Sethi, is a more automated system of producing 3D images that drives down cost and also provides more realistic product images.
For the most part, he noted, designers who are interpreting photos have created 3D images. As such, they tend to vary from the actual look of a product based on the designer’s own impressions. Outward technology builds the image based on consistent technical protocols, Sethi said, and so renders images that better reflects the real product.
“It makes for more accurate visualizations,” he added. “We can leverage our platform for 3D, AR, bring multiple SKUs in a curated way that’s relevant to the customer. We build the data at scale. Traditional 3D is very laborious, expensive and subjective.”
The Tango augmented reality application online on the Pottery Barn website allows consumers to place products the company offers in the context of their own rooms.
The app works with Tango-enabled smart phones currently available, such as from Lenovo. The app allows customers to add products to an existing room so they can see how new items will look in a setting, whether that’s in a current environment with existing furnishings or in more austere circumstances, such as an empty room. The app allows customers to add, move and remove furniture, rugs, lamps and pillows, change the color of the upholstery or pillows, and zoom in to see details or finish.
Beyond that, the app lets consumers request decorating help from in-store design specialists at select Pottery Barn stores in the San Francisco Bay area, with plans to roll the service out across the U.S.
The 3D Room View will initially focus on living room décor, with Williams-Sonoma saying it would provide for additional rooms by year’s end.
The 3D Room View design tool is one of the initiatives that Williams-Sonoma plans to launch this year across its digital operation. The company stated that efforts would leverage new technologies that support the customer pursuit of personal style by providing digital interactive tools.
As such, 360 Spin by Pottery Barn and Design Your Perfect Desk by PBteen are launching as multiple product and room planning tools that will have web and mobile versions. Shoppers can use 360 Spin to view a Pottery Barn sofa from all angles, with 120 SKUs available for initial gyration, for example.
Design Your Perfect Desk allows PBteen customers can pick their favorite workstation and build a room around it. In using the technology, they can do everything from trying different paint colors on the walls to reviewing the accessories they might want to pair with their candidate desks.
As they launched their new technology tools, John Strain, evp/chief digital and technology officer, Williams-Sonoma, said that the retailer has traditionally been a source of customer inspiration and that the augmented technology and visualization tools it is launching provide a fresh, innovative means to an end: encouraging consumers to create a home that best satisfies them.
Williams-Sonoma launched its new AR and visualization tools at the same time Strain appeared at the ShopTalk conference in Las Vegas.
At the event, Strain pointed out that Williams-Sonoma wants to maximize the effectiveness of its interaction with consumers whenever and wherever they come in contact with the company, through a catalog, a website or store, and at their moment of need, whether for an everyday purchase or for an occasion. At the same time, Williams-Sonoma teams are looking at how to reach consumers by banner and channel so when they approach the company they are as fully engaged as possible.
Although it uses established methods such as email marketing to deliver customer messages, Strain said Williams-Sonoma is constantly using technology to make interactions more substantive for shoppers when they are most likely to buy, so using 3D, AR or VR to create a virtual task space or position furniture in a living room is another way for the company to give each consumer a richer experience.
“We think this is how to get out of the email of the day, or worse yet, email of the hour, and the promo of the day, and get into an interaction that is content based and relevant to that consumer,” he said.
Strain said Williams-Sonoma wants to leverage “the power of augmented reality” to make a tough potentially expensive task, home decorating, less intimidating. As support for the shopper making big lifestyle decisions, Williams-Sonoma can provide additional value through the use of augmented and virtual reality that helps consumers select product that will be attractive— and less likely to generate the problems associated with returns—
in the home.
“We think this is really a breakthrough for us at this point,” Strain said. “From an omnichannel perspective, we think augmented reality is almost the definition of omnichannel. We think it is here, that the Google Tango platform is progressive and will phenomenally grow, fast.”
Even if that doesn’t occur, Strain said, Williams-Sonoma employees in San Francisco will be using the tech tools the company is developing to assist customers with their shopping in store, with New York to follow.
“And we’ll roll it throughout the country,” he added. “We have something going on 80,000 SKUs we have modeled in 3D.”
Outward’s Sethi noted that how Williams-Sonoma, through its several banners and channels, is willing to test out AR/VR programs varies and with the program in its infancy, the company is “just beginning to get feedback to see what works.”
If feedback demonstrates utility for the customer, Sethi said, Williams-Sonoma is more intent on running with a specific 3D or related initiative.
As hardware progresses, Sethi said, it is inevitable that imaging will undergo a revolution that will provide opportunities for retailers. The revolution is likely to come sooner rather than later and may kick off in as little as six months to a year as the technology improves and as accumulating experience allows retailers to invest where it will have the most influence on consumer behavior.
Today, retailers should focus on building core imaging resources, Sethi said, so as hardware evolves and writing applications becomes easier, they can quickly launch initiatives based on consumer response across the marketplace.
A Williams-Sonoma spokesperson told HomeWorld Business that the company isn’t yet ready to discuss those 3D/VR/AR initiatives that it is promising to launch over the next several months.
“For now, we are focused on learning how our customers and design specialists use 3D Room View to create a best in class experience,” the spokesperson said.
