Ikea unpacks first digital display
Swedish retail giant Ikea is enhancing its customer shopping experience at its flagship London branch with its first digital displays
Ikea partnered with BrightSign to create a high tech, immersive and interactive experience that would inform and entertain customers.
“The objective was to draw people into the new space and increase the amount of time they spent learning about and enjoying the products,” said Stuart Harris, creative director of projection mapping specialists Motion Mapping, who created the installation. “The IKEA team had come across a demo of an interactive table that we had shared on social media, and they approached us to do something similar. They wanted to combine digital elements with physical products in a way that was cool and exciting, and we had lots of ideas about how to do that.”
Although this was a new type of undertaking for the retailer, it was very much a collaborative effort. Basing the content around a story board from the in-house design and visual merchandising teams, Motion Mapping deployed a mix of carefully placed projectors, screens and sensors to bring it life.
Interactive
The result sees pieces of furniture animated or transformed into interactive information points while a friendly ‘co-worker’ character appears at intervals to provide titbits of knowledge about the products and prompt customers to explore them further.
And elements such as windows showing realistic outdoor scenes and a dazzling art wall work in synchronicity to create a stimulating environment that says all the right things about personal workspaces.
Motion Mapping used five individual BrightSign HD224 media players to present the five ‘windows’, which are in fact Samsung 65” 4K screens framed by wooden casements.
“The BrightSign players are perfect for this kind of synchronised playback set-up,” added Harris. “They’re extremely reliable and really simple to use. If we need to update content, we just log on to our control PC and push it out to all the players and it just works.”