In our advanced world today, although we can call an Uber and order food by simply saying “Alexa,” it is still a pain to shop for your home. Furniture options are scattered among multiple merchants and vary significantly by size and style. The struggle in furniture shopping begins with the lack of expertise in this area, since the furniture isn’t a frequently shopped category for most people. Therefore, you are looking for more advices and inputs from others. You collect more reviews from other shoppers, professional advices from interior designers, or feedback from your friends and family. Throughout the furniture shopping journey, the biggest hassle is the uncertainty around how selected furniture would actually look in person or in your room. You want to see the furniture with your own eyes to better understand the size and fit in the room, but this would mean traveling miles and dragging yourself to multiple locations. Oftentimes, only select SKUs are displayed in-store (particularly due to size), or the specific color you like is missing. Even after you’ve found your perfect sofa, it might fail to fit your living room due to incorrect measurements, or finding out that it just is not the right fit for your space. Some industry experts have already tried to tackle this pain point by inventing virtual reality tools, like lenses or computer mock-ups, to help customers imagine their future spaces. All existing solutions only allow the customer to use dimensions, and usually on a two-dimensional camera or lense basis. Today, there is currently no 360-view solution to help customers optimize this complicated decision.
We are proud to introduce HoloWorld: a 360-camera & projector that operates as a standalone or add-on attachment to any home assistance devices (i.e. Amazon Echo, Google Home) or mobile phone. It allows hassle-free furniture shopping experience through the latest technologies in image recognition, recommendation, and projection through holographic visualization. You will start your journey with HoloWorld by simply placing it at the spot where you envision the new piece of furniture to sit at. HoloWorld will be able to recognize objects in a room and classify them into categories, such as sofas, dining tables, accent chairs, and decorations, using its camera and image recognition technology. With the help of a 360 camera, it will be able to obtain the dimension of each object and room depth. Having recognized the objects, it can recommend additional items for the room based on the existing decor, color scheme, and space availability. These recommendations will be based on machine learning techniques similar to Amazon’s recommendation engine. The machine learning techniques will optimize the recommendations by leveraging the information about the particular user captured via the camera and her earlier purchase history, as well as about other users sharing similar preferences. Once the user approves any of the recommendations, our product can project a hologram of the object into the room. The hologram will be visualized through our product that emits smoke and lights at the exact spot where the furniture will be placed if purchased. The user will be able to see a 3D holographic representation of the furniture in the home and envision what the room will look like with the purchased furniture. Once our product is connected to any home assistance devices or mobile phones, it can coordinate an online order and purchase of the selected furnitures in just a couple of clicks or by requesting the order from the assistant by voice. Our advanced technologies in image recognition, machine learning based recommendation, and hologram projection paired with the strong B2B platform will simplify and redefine the furniture shopping experience for everyone. As we gain data on consumer preferences and behavior, our training sets will grow and our recommendation and image detection systems will improve.
The business potential of HoloWorld is huge. The US furniture market and the e-commerce furniture market were $137B and $29B respectively in 2017. These numbers are expected to continue growing, especially in the e-commerce space. HoloWorld is expected to capture $2.9B of the market by expanding the adoption of its tool and service by B2C customers and earning 7.5% – 10% affiliate fees on furniture sales completed through its B2B channel. For B2C customers, it will allow them to get recommendation on ideal products for their home and visualize how the desired pieces of furniture looks in their space through holographic projection. B2B customers include third-party furniture manufacturers (i.e. WestElm, IKEA), online retail aggregators (i.e. Amazon or Wayfair) and interior designers. For these B2B customers, HoloWorld will allow them to turn every consumer’s apartment into a showroom and get their newest designs into consumers’ apartments, making the selling process that much easier. Interior designers will be able to upload their room designs to an online design marketplace, which customers can from buy directly, with the designers earning a commision from the furniture companies. We will take a small cut from these “design marketplace” transactions.
The main competitors in the virtual furniture market are Wayfair Virtual Reality and Microsoft HoloLens. These two main competitors offer different products than HoloWorld, but will be able to compete directly for the addressable market. HoloWorld has a sustainable competitive advantage in the form of (future patented) holographic technology. While other competitors in the market offer furniture shopping experiences in the home, none offer a real “untethered” 3D experience. With no glasses or phone obstructing the consumer’s view, HoloWorld is a truly immersive and unique shopping experience.
Our funding ask for today is $250k to build our core tech. Longer term we will need an additional $1.25M ($500k to complete our core technology R&D, $500k for building out the platform, and $250k for operations). Paired with the capable founding team members, we will be able to complete the development of core technology around image recognition, recommendation algorithm, and image projection through hologram visualization. Additional partnerships with Amazon Echo, Google Home, the iPhone, smart TVs, and more will open a whole new set of opportunities that will enhance the customer experience and will surely set HoloWorld on the trajectory towards capturing greater market share.