Natuzzi, an Italian furniture company, has launched a virtual reality shopping experience, ushering in “a new age of sophisticated, white-glove client care.”

The brand’s Augmented Store is part of its New York City Madison Avenue showroom. It enables customers to enter a virtual reality version of their own house and decorate it with Natuzzi items.

The experience is powered by Microsoft’s HoloLens 2 headgear to interact with the environment, move products around, and change patterns and colours.

The Augmented Store, a virtual living room, is expected to improve Natuzzi’s sales by at least one-third, with the ability to have Augmented Stores in every Natuzzi store worldwide by the end of 2020. The Augmented Store is expected to allow Natuzzi’s stores to have less merchandise and instead, have a greater consumers experience by interacting with the Microsoft enabled Augmented Store.

The furniture industry’s adoption of Augmented Reality (AR) has been slow, but we’ve seen some interesting implementations by big players like Ikea, Opendesk, and Natuzzi. Recently, Ikea released a beta app that uses AR and Apple’s ARKit to help you visualize furniture in your virtual living room, and Natuzzi has released an app that lets you view a holographic scaled model on a tabletop. 

However, Natuzzi aims to go a step further in also offering an immersive VR experience. To bring the customer’s dream home to life in virtual reality, Natuzzi uses photographs, measurements and optionally CAD files to create a complete and faithful 3D rendering. 

We strive to make the experience of buying furniture through virtual living room a whole lot easier and more comfortable for our customers by decorating the digital environment from the product library from the get-go. This way, we are setting up a great starting point for the customers once they arrive at our store to make the ordering process fast, quick, and easy as can be. 

Natuzzi worked with Microsoft and its mixed-reality partner Hevolus Innovation to develop the Augmented Store. 

Revolutionizing the ecommerce industry 

Tulfa creates compelling, insightful, and engaging customer experiences that are critical to a company’s success. In an age where technology is transforming how people connect with companies, discerning brands rely on us to offer immersive creatives like Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality. We’re changing the ecommerce business by making customers feel special, empowered, and respected by brands. 

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