Virtue3D Launches Room Designer

Furniture World Magazine

Gruppo Euromobil and Nova Serenissima Partner with Virtue3D as First Furniture Manufacturers to Offer New Online Service to Consumers. Next-generation do-it-yourself Web-based home design tool is as easy and fun as playing a video game. Virtue3D, a leading provider of technologies that enable quick delivery and rendering of 3D images and complex scenes over the Internet, today announced the availability of Virtue3D Room Designer, a new Web-based room design application that lets furniture customers easily design, then “walk-through”, their living spaces online. With Virtue3D Room Designer, furniture retailers and manufacturers provide consumers with the opportunity to “try before you buy” using three-dimensional models of their existing furnishings mixed with new items from furniture manufacturers. By making it easier for consumers to precisely visualize how potential furniture purchases will look in their homes and offices, Virtue3D Room Designer goes far beyond what customers can currently do in a furniture showroom or online. Manufacturers expect that Virtue3D Room Designer will shorten sales cycles, increase customer satisfaction and lower merchandise return rates. Residential furnishings manufacturers Gruppo Euromobil (www.gruppoeuromobil.com) and Nova Serenissima (www.noveserenissima.it) have adopted Virtue3D Room Designer to let retail customers and wholesale distributors preview the latest styles and models over the Web. Gruppo Euromobil demonstrated Room Designer at the Milan Furniture Fair in April. The Easiest Way to Design and Furnish the Home Virtue3D Room Designer is simple to use. Prospective customers either select a room size and room type from one of the built-in templates, such as a small 10‘ by 13’ dining room or a large 20’ by 27’ office, or they can build their own room. Choosing from a variety of furniture templates, they can “furnish” the space using 3D models of both new and existing furnishings. Once furnished, customers can try out various fabrics and materials, select floor or table lamps, and add plants, drapes and wall hangings. Variables such as wall finishes, carpet colors or lighting conditions can be changed with the click of a mouse. They can take a virtual stroll through the room from any of five different angles to gauge the overall effect. Their choices can be saved as an HTML file for later recall or modification. “It’s virtually impossible to imagine how a floor sample sofa would look in a particular fabric or wood grain; guessing how it might look within your own home has been impossible,” said Maurizio Padovani, CEO, Padovani S.r.l. (www.padovani.it), distributor and content developer for Gruppo Euromobil and Nova Serenissima. “With Virtue3D Room Designer, you can create the customized item of your choice, place it in a room with other furniture and accessories, then actually walk around to view the completed room - all from your home computer.” The online furniture market is primed for rapid growth. According to Furniture Today, an industry trade publication, online furniture sales for 2000 were US$486M, up from $100M in 1998. Jupiter Research estimates the worldwide online furniture market in 2003 at US$5.7B. Design with Video Game-Like Speed on an Ordinary PC. Until now, it has not been possible to do two- or three-dimensional design easily over the Web. Data-rich images and low-speed connections made it impossibly slow to create and move 3D images on the ordinary computer. Virtue3D’s compression and 3D rendering technology - which allows images to be created and manipulated up to 33 times faster than other 3D technologies - makes the experience quick and easy, almost like playing a video game. “Traditional manufacturers are evolving e-commerce strategies that leverage their existing brands and content to take the online shopping experience to the next level. Virtue3D is allowing them to go far beyond a simple online catalog by providing useful tools that allow customers to ‘touch and feel’ the furniture and “walk around” their self-designed rooms before they buy,” said Lori Dustin, president of Virtue3D, Inc. Virtue3D is a leading provider of technologies and solutions that enable the delivery and rendering of 3D models and complex scenes over the Web. Virtue3D’s unique, proprietary technologies were designed to solve the two major obstacles of manipulating complex 3D content in networked environments: transmission and rendering. Virtue3D's technologies and solutions enable network-based 3D graphics applications to operate even over minimal network bandwidth with limited computing power. Virtue3D is privately held, with offices in Natick, Mass. and Haifa, Israel. Further information can be found on the World Wide Web at www.virtue3d.com.