While many shoppers use the Internet to research for furniture, the majority of purchases are done in store, as the customer is unable to fully visualise the product they are considering buying. Additionally, most of the furniture manufacturers and retailers have a limited number of products they can offer, competing in small and local markets. Usually, they haven’t able to connect with other manufacturers to offer greater product catalogues with different suppliers of different types of furniture, making it difficult for a customer to see together the pieces they would like to buy.

The FurnIT-SAVER project (Smart Augmented and Virtual Reality Marketplace for Furniture Customisation) will solve these problems making the use of virtual and augmented reality technologies, recommendation engines based on artificial intelligence and ecommerce solutions 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 and furniture layouts and allow manipulating the different attributes of furniture to the customer’s liking. The customer will be able to visualise the furniture it in their home environment using Augmented Reality.

The furniture manufacturers will upload their furniture catalogue in the FurnIT marketplace platform opening a new sales channel for their products.