Ikea attracts customer attention with an immersive and interactive experience

Motion Mapping has deployed in the store of Ikea at Wembley an infrastructure made up of projectors Optoma, Screens Samsung, sensors and players BrightSign.

Ikea has created an immersive and interactive installation for the home work department of his shop at Wembley. Its objective was to attract the attention of potential customers., informing them of the products on display and providing an attractive environment. For its creation, the multimedia players of BrightSign.

“The goal was to attract people to the new space and increase the time they spent learning and enjoying the products.”, Explains Stuart Harris, founder and creative director of Motion Mapping, company that was responsible for creating the installation. “The Ikea team had seen a demonstration of an interactive table we had shared on social media and asked us to do something similar.. They wanted to combine digital elements with physical products in an attractive and exciting way, And we had a lot of ideas on how to do it.”.

Although it was a new type of company for the retailer., it was very much a collaborative effort. Basing content on a storyboard from internal design and visual merchandising teams, Motion Mapping deployed a mix of projectors, screens and sensors carefully placed to bring it to life.

The result is visually appealing, attractive and surprising. Furniture is animated or transformed into interactive information points. A friendly 'co-worker' appears at intervals to provide information about products and encourage customers to keep exploring them. And elements like windows showing realistic exterior scenes and a dazzling artistic wall work in sync to create a stimulating environment that says everything there is to say about personal workspaces..

Motion Mapping has used five media players BrightSign HD224 individual to present the five 'windows', what they really are Samsung 4K displays 65 Inch framed by wooden frames.

Two more HD224 feed the projectors Optoma mapping animated images in kitchen cabinets (ZU500USTe) and at a desk in the lounge area (ZH406ST).

Other elements of the screen work with Green Hippo Karst Using Datapath FX4 with fiber optic HDMI cables from Kramer. Motion Mapping uses BrightAuthor:connected to create, publish and manage content, which is stored locally and delivered to players over a private Ethernet network.

“BrightSign players are perfect for this type of synced playback setup”, observes Harris. “They are reliable and very easy to use. If we need to update the content, we just have to connect to the control computer and send it to all the players, and it works”.

Cost was another of the main advantages of BrightSign; “If we had used a media server for every 4K display it would have been more expensive”, Harris points out.

Motion Mapping has built the entire screen to be self-managing. “We take eight or nine different systems, we create a custom software to unite everything, and now we just have to help Ikea update the content on certain occasions, such as for Halloween or Christmas. The reliability and simplicity of BrightSign players means there's never any problem right now”.

The installation of all the display equipment took about four days. “We had to do it while the store was open. It was complicated because there was a lot of passage through the area and we worked with stairs through a very busy corridor. People were very curious about what we were doing”, remember Harris.

Interest levels have remained high as the project was launched in early April.. Staff report that buyers spend more time in the workspace section than before and are willing to talk and ask questions about the exhibition.

Other articles on BrightSign, DataPath, Green Hippo, Ikea, Kramer, Kramer Electronics, Motion Mapping, Optoma, Samsung