AN furniture shopping

Its a banal but useful application of the technologies involved in AN for consumer culture and can extend to other industries.

A trip to find a new piece of carpenter's couture usually means guessing how an item will look and hoping that the piece fits well with the surrounds. Its only on delivery that the piece turns out to be incongruous to its surrounds.

The future will see the shopper "trying on" an item before they buy. A recent image of their living room and a 3D model of the item overlayed upon it will mean furniture shopping will become as easy an experience as clothes shopping.

In the short term this will likely be achieved by desktop AR applications in the shops rather than distributed throughout the consumer base of AN-capable smartphones however the AN device is likely to be the final platform. A fully AN-capable phone capable of sensing and understanding its environment is a concept dubbed the Amiphone and it can comprehend a room in 3D, perhaps using an algorithm that asks the user to move around the room in a circle with the phone facing inwards to generate a 3D map so the item can be viewed from all angles and with different lights.

In fact this development may sound a final death knell to the high streeet furniture shop. The web will become the high street, the designs viewed in home rather than in a showroom, the fabrics and textures selected and the unit created bespoke - the epitome of Toffler's third
wave consumer culture. The 3D design is the valued content like the computer code of Microsoft is the valued content, not the materials like second wave products such as the Model T Ford.

Democratisation of furniture design will be the unintended consequence of the proliferation of AN shopping as new designers need only create models using their AN applications, the prosumer tailors it to their individuality and requirements then a product manufacturer creates the physical object.

The 3D image of the room can also be translated into a digital space for those who want to integrate their real life seamless with their digital life in applications like Second Life. The blend between the real and the virtual becomes blurred through the application of AN.