MicroD launches 3D Room Planner for Art Van Furniture

Published on : Saturday, September 29, 2018

MicroD has launched a 3D Room Planner and augmented reality program for Michigan-based Top 100 retailer, Art Van Furniture.  The 3D room planner for Art Van Furniture was introduced to their team at the 2018 Spring High Point Market at Art Van’s show space in the Furniture Plaza Atrium.

GROWING THE PARTNERSHIP: ART VAN + MICROD

The partnership began when Art Van Franchising was searching for a way to leverage technology in their sales process to potential store owners. With the success of MicroD’s 3D Visualization and Augmented Reality software launched in early 2017 and the Virtual Reality experience at Fall High Point Market in 2017, Art Van chose the 25-year industry leader in visualization technology to customize a 3D solution for their franchise development. MicroD’s OmniVueXR 3D room planner and augmented reality applications, along with MicroD’s capabilities for 3D model development, served as the platform for Art Van to launch their solution to a new, integrated sales process for their growing retail store owner customer base at Market.

DELIVERING AN INTERACTIVE 3D BUSINESS BENEFIT

“You hear it across retail right now, ‘technology, technology, technology’ and our franchising customers are no different,” explains Drew Dolski, Director of Franchise Development, Art Van Furniture. “They want to be entertained and engaged just like a retail customer in a showroom. So, we need to show a different experience to our potential store owners than other businesses out there.”

3D ROOM PLANNER + 3D MODELS

Art Van Franchising leverages MicroD’s 3D room planner and 3D models to show potential retail store prospects a customized showroom filled with Art Van’s exclusive products. With MicroD’s 3D room planner software application, the retail prospect can see the benefits of partnering with Art Van Franchising by customizing their showroom to include the exclusive product–in the form of high quality 3D models–from Art Van Franchising.

The 3D room planner gives Art Van the ability to create multi-dimensional architectural showroom elements such as flooring, wall color, windows and doors for the franchised space.  Each floorplan can then be filled with over 125 digitized 3D furniture and accessory options.

AUGMENTED REALITY

In addition to the dynamic and time-saving room planning software, Art Van Furniture has also adopted MicroD’s augmented reality (AR) technology.  The Art Van Franchising department can produce a composite of a real-life showroom by importing 3D products into the AR application. Items are easily reposition and will automatically scale to fit the room’s dimensions.

This tool gives franchising retailers at Market a real-time view of their storefront with the addition of exclusive branded signage and banners made in the MicroD 3D platform. “Every step of the sales process can be visualized and customized for the retailer using this 3D technology by MicroD,” says Keith Johns, Vice President of Operations, MicroD. “It is a very unique way to approach using 3D as part of a company’s growth strategy, and we’re excited to see it contribute to the goals of Art Van Franchising.”

THINKING OUTSIDE THE BOX WITH 3D

“We love how our customers come to use with these different concepts and different use cases—things that we may not have necessarily had on our product roadmap,” says Chief Product Officer Richard Sexton. “This helps us build up the 3D technology for many different applications and push that out to the industry while building the robustness of the program.” Officer Richard concluded.

The innovative steps that Art Van Furniture is implementing to bring AR into store design is a revolution that’s ahead of the curve for the Home Furnishings community.  Data projections highlight that “worldwide revenues for the augmented reality and virtual reality market will grow from $5.2 billion in 2016 to more than $162 Billion in 2020, [representing] a compound annual growth rate of 181.3% over the 2015-2020 forecast period.”  The early-adoption of the 3D room planner, modeling and Augmented Reality are a testament to Art Van’s forward-thinking approach to business.