IKEA VR Experiences
Starting in 2017, I helped produce a number of virtual reality experiences for IKEA. These would be available in all of their British stores. The first of these experiences was a time machine, showing how interior design tastes had evolved, with the help of IKEA since it opened its first UK store in 1987.
The customer was transported to an 80s living room and from there was able to experience changing fashions throughout the decades. There were informational popups to highlight famous IKEA products and key trends. The user could move between rooms and choose the time period they wanted to see. This made it easy and fun to quickly compare different eras.
I built a custom stereoscopic image viewer for the project, which allowed me to give the user control of the time period and the room they were viewing at all times. It also made the implementation of the popups and era-appropriate music much easier.
The following year, we produced an experience to coincide with the newly launched “The Wonderful Everyday” campaign. This took the form of a 360º animation, showing how cluttered spaces could be improved through cunning storage systems.
That same year we also produced a second animation using the same system, celebrating IKEA’s famous blue bags as part of another campaign. It involved a lot of complex cloth physics simulation to create the effect of items magically exiting the bag but I was very proud of the results.
Finally, for Christmas 2019 we produced another interactive experience, this time tackling “home-shame”. The customer could choose from a number of solutions to cover up or repair embarrassing home defects like cracked walls or tired furniture. This created a huge number of possible user choices so the experience was built in real-time 3d. It also allowed for future proofing of the app, making it compatible with more advanced, stand alone VR headsets, where the user could move around the space more naturally.
In total there were 4,700 uses of the experiences, across 21 stores. IKEA purchased almost 60 devices and distributed them to all of their UK spaces. We managed them remotely to simplify the process for staff, and the devices are still being used in some locations.