YouTube Project Showroom Overview Video

Electrolux kitchen appliances with Behr wall paint

Electrolux kitchen appliances with a different Behr wall paint

Project Showroom is a technology preview that establishes a vision for a service for home furnishing suppliers to enable their customers to visualize their products in real-life room settings. It is our software as a service approach to kitchen design software and bathroom design software. The basis of Project Showroom is photorealistic rendering using a farm of computers that are "in the cloud." Accessibility to numerous computers in the cloud makes solutions like Project Showroom practical. Typical consumers would never buy 120 computers just to see a synthetic photograph rendered in 8 seconds. Normally users have one computer and wait 960 seconds (16 minutes). On the other hand, manufacturers might be willing to rent 120 computers for 8 seconds. Eight seconds later, it could be another user's turn. You get the idea.

A tenant of Project Showroom is photorealism. Consumers and manufacturers have to get the sense that they are experiencing something before it is real. The products are real. The manufacturers are real. The computer rendering looks real. Our Product Manager, Noah Kennedy, was keen to point out how blue wall paint reflections appear on white cabinets in his YouTube video:

• YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i15PcjMGLqo
• non-YouTube: showroom_overview.mp4 (5957.0K)

The video also features a demonstration we participated in with Jenn-Air at the Kitchen/Bathroom Industry Show in Atlanta.

Keeping it real is alive in the Lab.