RoOomy gives retailers a 3D imagery primer

SAN JOSE, Calif. — Consider this a primer for you furniture manufacturers and retailers wondering whether 3D images and augmented reality are practical for your business.

Augmented reality (AR) was so prevalent at the Consumer Electronics Show’s product demonstrations, Furniture Today sought insight from RoOomy, a company that creates 3D technology applications exclusively for the home furnishings and real estate industries.

Having created its own iOS app for consumers, plus the AR and room-planning technologies and 3D images of more than 100,000 SKUs for 35 retailers — names such as Havertys, Wayfair, Houzz and Amazon — RoOomy seemed a good source to tap.

Let’s start with the question that may be foremost on everyone’s mind.

“The price for one SKU, to virtualize that, is somewhere between $45 and $65,” said Jan-Hein Pullens, COO and co-founder of RoOomy. “That is premium quality (of) a highly detailed SKU.”

In the world of 3D, high quality means realistic.

“Take a sectional, an upholstery product,” Pullens said. “If it is very symmetrical, it doesn’t look real. You want some lived-in effect in the bottom, as if somebody sat in the chair, so you want creases, you want cracks. It needs to be as real and as lived in as possible.

“You get those details either in the mapping technology, the cloth modifiers, or you can also do that in the mesh, the frame-to-core structure, and all of these need to be linked and weighed and balanced in order to get an efficient polygon count model with the highest quality.”

As technically intimidating as that may sound, RoOomy can create a good 3D mesh from just two to four 2D images and the dimensions of an item.

“If the input is just a 2D image without the details on the fabrics, the textures, the materials, then either we enhance them with our own vast material library — a wood veneer, a metal — or we can create repeats of the textures, to ensure the 3D image looks as close to the source as possible,” Pullens said.

The product’s 3D image, he emphasized, “needs to look as real as possible, otherwise it feels like a gimmick, and we can’t have that.”

But there are multiple quality levels, he added, depending on the use. “Do you want it for real-time render engines, like the one you see on the (RoOomy) website, or is it for high-quality imagery to be used in marketing collateral or for lifestyle themes, or is it to be used in VR as well as AR?

“All these use cases requirements dictate the requirements for the 3D model, as well as its underlying technology for creating the file, file sizes and details in the models.”

Demand prompted RoOomy to open its own factory in China, and it’s now producing an average of 10,000 images monthly. Large retailers have 20,000 to 50,000 images produced in a year, while “other retailers have somewhere between 1,000 and 6,000 products in their catalog” rendered in 3D in a year, Pullens said.

Between perennial best-sellers and new product launches, it’s not always financially feasible to render everything in 3D, Pullens agreed.

“So a lot of our customers decide to start virtualizing 25% of their catalog first, especially the fast runners or the ones that they really want to push, and then trickle down to the rest of the catalog.”

RoOomy advises clients to begin with models that span 35 categories “in order to do proper online interior design, virtual staging or lifestyle scenes,” Pullens said. “We have experience in advising our customers to select the models and categories to start visualizing their catalogs.”

As for its business model, “part of our engagement with these companies is a license to virtualize their catalogs, and part of the deal is a license to use their models in our platform to serve our real estate customers for virtual staging,” Pullens said.

That means a real estate company that has virtualized tours of its properties can use 3D furnishings from RoOomy’s furniture clients.

In December, RoOomy launched a virtual reality platform with Matterport, a 3D media technology company that integrates virtual staging with furniture purchasing.

If you shop for a new home on a white label RoOomy platform, “you will see many catalogs of known brands, and you will see some very big online players with substantial amounts of products in our catalog,” Pullens said.

Retailers pay per virtual rendering and a technology fee to virtualize their catalog. They can also purchase a white-label AR app.

Real estate companies pay for the virtual staging of a property and the cleaning of photos of that property.

“You can imagine that some photos from real estate brokers are of very cluttered houses,” Pullens said. “We clean the photos,” which means virtually removing the cluttering items, “and decorate it virtually with our catalog.”

Pullens co-founded RoOomy seven years ago, “and our breakthrough was in 2011 when we signed up Crate & Barrel for an online room planning application,” he said. “Crate & Barrel used our white-label technology, and we created virtual models for that.

“Their interior design team, they are still using it,” Pullens said, although “they don’t have it live anymore in the app stores.”

The original article can be read at https://www.furnituretoday.com/business-news/rooomy-gives-retailers-3d-imagery-primer/