tour exploration ikea

Inspired by the insights of the Life at Home Report, renowned photographer, Annie Leibovitz and IKEA step inside the homes of people around the world, creating authentic portraits of their life at home.

The Mentorship

Six aspiring photographers from around the world, capture the essence of Life at Home under the guidance of our Artist in Residence: Annie Leibovitz.

The Life at Home Report

In this unique edition of the IKEA Life at Home Report, we explore the past, present and future. Dive into a decade’s worth of discoveries and learn how we enable meaningful change for the many people across the world.

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• Doing more vs. doing less
• Togetherness vs. privacy
• Living well vs. Living within our means
• Home stories
• IKEA Artist in Residence
• Methodology
• Past reports

IKEA is hosting first-ever IKEA Festival, a tour of homes around the world for 24-hours

ÄLMHULT, Sweden , Sept. 15, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Tomorrow on September 16, 2021 , IKEA Festival will open the door to everyday homes, studios, and neighborhoods worldwide, as people turn their living rooms, kitchens, bedrooms, and backyards into virtual stages for unique performances, discussions, and experiences. Over 100 homes in more than 50 countries around the world will be showcased during the free festival. Headliners include Kaytranada , Virgil Abloh , Masego , Pasta Queen , Paul Svensson , MØ , The Scott Family and more!

The festival is inspired by the IKEA vision to create a better everyday life for the many people. "This is a new kind of experience IKEA wants to offer, celebrating, connecting, and engaging around life at home. Home tours around the world will open doors to new experiences and new inspiration. We want to spark a conversation on the more sustainable and affordable life at home of tomorrow. And just as with any festival, you can expect a few surprises," says Erika Intiso , Managing Director of IKEA Marketing and Communication AB.

The festival set up and program

The festival will be streamed on IKEA.com/Festival and IKEA.us/Festival starting at 2AM EST / 8AM CET on September 16 . Throughout the 24 hours of programming, attendees can expect to see intimate concerts and performances from musicians and DJs from their own homes and studios. Interior design fans will find home makeover inspiration and discover how designers and IKEA collaborators work in their own unique spaces. Chefs will participate in cooking challenges featuring healthy, planet-friendly, and no-waste recipes and discussions around the kitchen table about topics such as circularity, air, play, and spaces.

The festival experience will also open the door to IKEA locations around the world, with livestreams from the factory floor in Zbąszynek, Poland and the prototype shop in Älmhult, Sweden . IKEA fans can explore the diverse history of the brand over the decades through the digital IKEA museum.

"Life at home has taken on a whole new meaning for every one of us over the past year, and by being virtually connected, we can open the door to many more lives around the world – exploring how we all live, celebrating individuality and creativity. Our first IKEA Festival will bring people together around life at home in a new way, both online and in our stores, and will be the beginning of a longer-term movement of real homes and real lives," says Olivia Ross Wilson , Communications Director, Ingka Group.

IKEA Festival room sets

My Home Turf: Home is anywhere that feels like…well, home. Join artists such as MØ, Kanis, Niki and Masego as they show their cities, neighborhoods, and communities – and treat you to a performance.

IKEA News: Travel the world and meet our co-workers and collaborators right now – in-store, at the factory, at the office, or in the studio, such as former collaboration partner Virgil Abloh .

Home Cooking : Open the door to delicious-smelling kitchens all over the world and be inspired by chefs cooking up old and new favorites. Chefs include Pasta Queen, Paul Svensson , and more.

DJ Relay: Don't stop the music – you're invited to a marathon set of club music, straight from the DJ's own home. Enjoy sets from Kaytranada, Loraine James and ZULI , to name a few.

Home Visits: Welcome to a global home tour, as strangers and some well-known personalities like Ilse Crawford share what's inside the most important place in the world: their home.

IKEA Museum: Go back in time and explore everything that has made and shaped IKEA: the good, the bad, the beautiful and the ugly.

To access the festival, please visit IKEA.com/Festival  or IKEA.us/Festival . The event is free and no sign up is required. The festival will open its doors starting at 8AM CET /2AM ET on Thursday, September 16 .

About IKEA IKEA offers well-designed, functional and affordable, high-quality home furnishing, produced with care for people and the environment. There are several companies with different owners, working under the IKEA Brand, all sharing the same vision: to create a better everyday life for the many people. IKEA was founded in Sweden in 1943.

About the IKEA franchise system   The IKEA retail business is operated through a franchise system with franchisees that are authorised to market and sell the IKEA product range within specified geographical territories. Inter IKEA Systems B.V. is the owner of the IKEA Concept and worldwide IKEA franchisor, who also assigns different IKEA companies to develop the product range, supply products and deliver communication solutions. Today, 12 different groups of companies have the right to own and operate IKEA sales channels under franchise agreements with Inter IKEA Systems B.V.

About Inter IKEA Group Inter IKEA Group includes Inter IKEA Systems B.V., IKEA of Sweden AB, IKEA Supply AG and IKEA Industry AB related businesses. Inter IKEA Holding B.V. is the holding company for the Inter IKEA Group.

About Ingka Group Ingka Group (Ingka Holding B.V. and its controlled entities) is one of 12 different groups of companies that own and operate IKEA retail under franchise agreements with Inter IKEA Systems B.V. Ingka Group has three business areas: IKEA Retail, Ingka Investments and Ingka Centres. Ingka Group is a strategic partner in the IKEA franchise system, operating 390 IKEA stores in 32 countries. These IKEA stores had 706 million visits during FY20 and 3.6 billion visits to IKEA.com. Ingka Group operates business under the IKEA vision - to create a better everyday life for the many people by offering a wide range of well-designed, functional home furnishing products at prices so low that as many people as possible can afford it.

For more information see  www.ikea.com/us/en/ ,  @IKEAUSANews ,  @IKEAUSA  or IKEAUSA on  Facebook ,  YouTube ,  Instagram  and  Pinterest .

SOURCE IKEA

Explore The History Of Ikea With A Visit To This Small European Town

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to spend the night in an Ikea? Depending on one's view of the global furniture chain, that could be a dream scenario or a nightmare descent into the ninth circle of consumerist hell. Whatever the case, it's the kind of image that arises unbidden in the shopper's mind while wandering past bedroom models in a seemingly endless Ikea showroom.

Five of the world's six biggest Ikea stores are in Asia. They're scattered across the Philippines, South Korea, China, and Thailand. As any meatball lover knows, however, Ikea's roots are in Sweden. Just outside the capital, Stockholm, you'll find the third-biggest Ikea in Kungens Kurva. Two hours by train from the neighboring capital of Copenhagen, Denmark, you'll find the site of the original Ikea in the town of Älmhult, Sweden.

The store, which opened in 1958, operated for over 50 years before it finally closed in 2012. Since then, the building has been converted into the Ikea Museum. On a trip to Scandinavia, you might as well loop in some Ikea history. But follow  Rick Steves' advice and avoid this European destination outside of a brief window. Yet another claim to fame for Älmhult is that it's the location of the world's only Ikea hotel, where you can stay overnight any time of year. Think of it as a fully furnished, brand-name version of the Museum of Natural History in the movie "Night at the Museum." Yes, meatballs are on the breakfast menu.

Rooming in the Ikea Hotell

Älmhult's Ikea Hotell originally opened as a 25-room motel in 1964. It was designed to give shoppers a place to dine and rest after they visited the first Ikea store. Many were out-of-towners who had been lured to this outpost by the novel prospect of seeing mail-order furniture exhibited in person. From the very beginning, travel was a crucial component of the business. When you've spent hours walking around a vast Ikea — only to end in a self-service warehouse — it's easy to understand the appeal of a warm bed in a furniture store with its own hotel.

Appropriately, all the hotel's furniture and decorations come from Ikea. It's a very on-brand kind of place. They even poke fun at how the company farms out furniture assembly to the DIY customer or makes you pay extra to have it assembled. The hotel website promises, "Don't worry — our 250 rooms come fully assembled," so you can climb right into bed without worrying about how the pieces of the frame fit together.

The rooms range from 43-square-foot cabins, fit for just one person, to 194-square-foot family rooms with bunk beds. The breakfast buffet is free for guests, as are amenities like the gym, laundry, WiFi, parking, and charging your electric car. They'll even loan you a bike at no cost so you can ride around Älmhult and see the world outside Ikea. It's all part of the hotel's aesthetic as a community where guests can "feel at home."

Sweden, by way of the Ikea Museum

At the Ikea Museum in Älmhult, you can view old catalogs, learn more about successful products and failed designs, and see furnished interiors modeling "life at home" in every decade from the 1950s to the 2010s. You'll even get some background on the company's peculiar naming process. The name Ikea, for instance, wasn't just chosen to make it sound like a lightbulb going off over someone's head before a shopping spree. It may come as a surprise to those accustomed to the American pronunciation, but Ikea is pronounced "ee-kay-uh," not "eye-kee-uh." The name was formed from the initials of company founder Ingvar Kamprad and two places from his childhood: the farm of Elmtaryd and the village of Agunnaryd.

If you can't impress your friends with this knowledge and tales of Älmhult, maybe there's no hope of assembling a bigger tour group for a true, Ikea-style "Night at the Museum." 50 people or more can rent the museum out for a private soiree, complete with a meatball buffet. Granted, some travelers might regard the premises of the first Ikea as a tourist trap, like the "original Starbucks" that Seattle coffee lovers need to avoid . However, your trip doesn't have to begin or end there. Sweden in general is considered one of the most family-friendly countries in Europe . If you're taking the train in from Denmark, the Ikea Hotell and Museum could just be your family's hello — or Swedish-friendly "Hej!" — to the country at large.

Live now: A home tour around the world with IKEA Festival

Creating a better everyday life at home starts with an open door. IKEA is taking it to the next level by hosting our first virtual IKEA home tour around the world. The free IKEA Festival takes place today on IKEA.com and plays out across many virtual ‘Rooms’ full of experiences related to music, food, design and life at home. As part of the 100+ Festival happenings, IKEA opens its doors, too, sharing news, offering behind-the-scenes access and making our IKEA history globally and digitally accessible through the grand opening of IKEA Museum Digital.

IKEA Festival: Beyond 24 hours of experiences The 24-hour IKEA Festival begins at 8am CET, and no registration is required. Starting off each hour, something new is broadcasted and other festival experiences follow. Attendees can see artists, designers, DJ’s, chefs, makers, experts, creators and many other talents turn their living rooms, kitchens, bedrooms and backyards into virtual stages. Visitors can also pick and choose from a library of on-demand content.

In total, the IKEA Festival is taking place in over 100 homes in more than 50 countries. On the global Festival site, everything is available in English. On local Festival sites, most or all content is available in local languages. After 16 September, the IKEA Festival platform will continue to be available as a hub for everything IKEA knows about making life at home better. New content and life at home experiences will be added throughout the year, building a global community that connects homes all over the world.

“Through hosting the first virtual IKEA Festival, we want to open doors to new experiences and bring people together,” says Olivia Ross Wilson, Communications Director, Ingka Group (IKEA Retail). “For over 70 years, IKEA has conducted home visits to understand the needs, dreams and challenges of the many people and we’re seeing how much has changed in the past 18 months. We want to help as many people as possible to experience and celebrate the weird and wonderful sides of real life at home,” Olivia continues. “Of course, we’re opening our doors, too, and giving everyone a glimpse into the everyday life of IKEA.”

IKEA Museum Digital: Behind the vast, vibrant history Throughout the Festival, IKEA will share past decades of notable home furnishing and IKEA milestones. Starting today, visitors can also access IKEA Museum Digital , the most extensive online source of knowledge and facts about IKEA. Now people across the world can experience the vast and vibrant history of IKEA in an online version of the in-person exhibition at the IKEA Museum in Älmhult, Sweden. The new platform contains stories about IKEA founder Ingvar Kamprad and some of the most iconic products and memorable designs from the 1940s to today. 

“Many of the stories reveal the inner workings of IKEA and have never been shared publicly before. Whether it’s about a triumph, a great mistake, a dangerous adventure, or a revolutionary collapse – we have done our best to tell it like it was,” says Jutta Viheriä, Strategic Initiatives Leader at IKEA Museum.

Learn the story behind the leather-and-chrome AMIRAL chair from the 1970’s, designed by Karin Mobring for IKEA. Or time travel to see what kind of living room styles were popular in the 1980’s. The main exhibition at IKEA Museum Digital is the Story of IKEA, designed as a timeline that offers visitors a broader, deeper knowledge about the history and culture of IKEA. It lets you follow the young entrepreneur Ingvar Kamprad, who had a vision to make the everyday life better for the many people, and learn about his dreams, solutions, setbacks and triumphs. Follow the IKEA history in chronological order – or jump right into any of the 100 editorial articles, movies and interviews with the people involved in the journey of creating and growing IKEA.The content is available online in English and Swedish and accessible at any time and any place.

IKEA Festival highlights and times Download the complete IKEA Festival schedule in the Media assets below.

Music-related sessions

• MØ, 23:00-00:00 CET. Follow MØ from her hometown of Copenhagen, Denmark, as she shows us the city through her eyes and ends it all with a unique performance.
• Masego, 04:00-05:00 CET. Micah Davis, known professionally as Masego , is a Jamaican-American saxophone player, singer, rapper, comedian & DJ. Masego invites us to Los Angeles for a tour and a performance.
• TOKiMONSTA, 07:00-08:00 CET. The Los Angeles producer and Young Art label boss, TOKiMONSTA has helped define the sound of modern dance and beat music over the past decade. She’ll close out our 24-hour DJ relay.

Food in focus

• Paul Svensson, 10:00-11:00 CET. Welcome home and into the kitchen of Swedish chef Paul Svensson , where we learn more about everyday no waste cooking – making great food out of the stuff hidden in the fridge and drawers. 
• The Pasta Queen, 20:00-21:00 CET. Nadia Caterina Munno has turned her presences on TikTok and YouTube into a mini Food Network, dishing out recipes, advice and a little cooking comedy for anyone who’s ever wanted to try down-home Italian DIY.

Studio visits with designers

• Virgil Abloh, 12:00-13:00 CET. Designer, entrepreneur, DJ and former IKEA collaborator Virgil Abloh is one of the most influential creative forces of our time. He shares what’s on his mind right now, from his Paris studio.
• Ilse Crawford, 22:00-23:00 CET. Check out the London studio of the IKEA collaboration partner Ilse Crawford – designer, author and Creative Director of Studioilse. Hear her thoughts on home and timeless design, including some of the upcoming IKEA products.

Tours of the unseen IKEA world

• The Protoype Shop, 09:00-10:00 CET. IKEA designer Marcus Arvonen leads a tour of the IKEA Prototype Shop that’s equipped with 100 different machines for developing within 3D printing, comfort/textiles, wood, metal, textile print, and surface treatment.
• Warehouse drones, 11:00-12:00 CET. New technology allows us to solve problems in smarter ways. Join the drones working for IKEA during night when they operate in a warehouse.

Media enquiries

For further information, journalists and media professionals can contact us at [email protected] or by calling +46 70 993 6376

Related media assets

Sofa musuem

Product stories 1970 AMIRAL

IKEA Festival schedule

Virgil Abloh

Pattern shop

Paul Svensson

Ilse Crawford

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Virtual Reality Showroom

For IKEA, we created a high-definition, interactive showroom that uses the immersive power of virtual reality to offer an innovative 3D product experience. With new ways of exploration and visualization, customers can bring IKEA rooms to life – opening their mind and home to new possibilities.

To view this content, you’ll need to update your privacy settings for the “Vimeo” service.

A new dimension for democratic design

IKEA believes that design should be for all – "democratic design" they call it. Demonstrated by the plethora of showrooms housing thousands of different items, there's something to everyone's liking along IKEA's walkway. Yet, customers have to wait until they get home and unwrap their flat packs to truly become part of the IKEA experience. As the first digital agency worldwide, Demodern set out to engage IKEA shoppers and democratize the actual store visit as well – with an in-store VR application.

Heart of the hub

The Virtual Home Experience lies at the center of IKEA's home furnishing hub – a playful interior lab where IKEA focuses on inspiring and co-creation with its customers. The VR experience works like a creative primer by inviting them to visualize different combinations. It sets customers free to think beyond the given things, making the most out of their visit to the hub and helping them truly find their very own room for life.

A space for ideas

Insights can't be had on-demand. However, virtual reality can act as a form of engineered serendipity, and improve people's chances of having them.

VR-induced creativity

The application provides an immersive and emotional product experience that revolutionizes the way customers engage in interior decoration. After slipping into IKEA's virtual showroom, visitors are able to explore and configure furniture items and their environmental context in real-time. In the blink of an eye, they can try different fabrics, swap the wall color and even change the time of day to see their combinations in a different light. It empowers the visitor to visualize their own taste, inspire and expand their mind with new ideas.

Context over technology

Given the context, the Virtual Home Experience pushes VR as the most meaningful and effective platform for getting into a creative mental state – providing a radical experience that pulls visitors out from the walkway and puts them into a full-scale flow of colorful emotions and exciting surprises.

Binaural immersion

Welcomed by IKEA's very own speaker and engulfed in high-definition 3D spatialized sound, the room and its environment come to life while the user can truly feel part of the space.

Oculus in the wild

As the first public VR installation of its kind, various aspects of the application and the hub had to be rethought to make the Oculus Rift ready for unattended use at a store that welcomes thousands of people a day. Special attention was given to anything, from easy on-boarding, health notifications to foolproof interactions and smooth cable management. Installed as a prototype in Germany's most vibrant city, Berlin, IKEA and Demodern source learnings for further development on a daily basis – using application analytics as well as a broad scale of qualitative user feedback given directly at the point-of-sale.

Virtual realism

Crafted in and composed of high-end, photorealistic 3D-renderings, the application provides a captivating 360º stereoscopic interior decoration experience with brilliant product staging – no matter the configuration.

Harmonious user experience

The Virtual Home Experience intertwines a recognizable visual interface and motion design with touchless interactions. The result is a multi-dimensional signature brand and product experience that looks and feels like IKEA. Simple interactions and clever focus mechanisms allow the user to customize the room's interior and many facets of its environment in a glimpse.

Product of democracy

As trends and seasons change, so does the Virtual Home Experience. It not only came to be through many iterations, it will also continue to evolve through a culture of collaboration between IKEA, its customers and Demodern. The intimate moment inside the virtual room leverages an opportunity to co-create with visitors – letting users contribute to the development of the room by submitting feedback from within the experience.

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20 th annual webby awards, nike digital retail experience.

Take a tour of the places that inspired Ikea's furniture names

Photo: Mikael Svensson/Johnér

Ingvar Kamprad, who founded Ikea, named bathroom items after Swedish lakes, and couches after Swedish towns and villages - now the Swedish tourist board is encouraging you to visit them

You know Ikea , the Swedish furniture giant, and you no doubt have a few Ikea items in your home. But do you know the story behind the sometimes unpronounceable names of their furniture and household items?

This winter, VisitSweden , the Swedish tourist board, has launched a tongue-in-cheek campaign to shed light on the company’s unique naming process, because many of its popular items are named after real places in Sweden. And now they want to reclaim them.

Take Ektorp, for example. It’s the name of one of Ikea’s most popular sofas, but it’s also a little spot, around 5km from Stockholm, where you’ll find lakes and beautiful green spaces. Google ‘Ektorp’ and you’ll find pictures and prices for sofas before you discover the real place.

IKEA Through the Ages

Join one of our knowledgeable guides on a journey through 80 years of products, business development – and challenges. Because the road hasn’t always been straight. It’s been lined with illuminating setbacks and problems that needed full attention. Ingvar Kamprad preferred to look to the future, and an often-cited quote is, “Most things still remain to be done. A glorious future!”. The words ring just as true today, but we can still allow ourselves a look in the rearview mirror to learn a thing or two and enjoy some historical gems. We hope you’ll gain some new perspectives – and maybe even pick something up that can be useful in everyday life at home.

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IKEA launches AI-powered design experience (no Swedish meatballs included)

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Time's almost up! There's only one week left to request an invite to The AI Impact Tour on June 5th. Don't miss out on this incredible opportunity to explore various methods for auditing AI models. Find out how you can attend here .

For IKEA, the latest in digital transformation is all about home design driven by artificial intelligence (AI) – minus the home furnishing and decor retailer’s famous Swedish meatballs. 

Today, it launched IKEA Kreativ, a design experience meant to bridge the ecommerce and in-store customer journeys, powered by the latest AI developments in spatial computing, machine learning and 3D mixed reality technologies. Available in-app and online, IKEA Kreativ’s core technology was developed by Geomagical Labs, an IKEA retail company, which Ingka Group (the holding company that controls 367 stores of 422 IKEA stores) acquired in April 2020.

IKEA Kreativ is the next step in IKEA’s long journey towards digital transformation. According to the company, it is the home retail industry’s first fully featured mixed-reality self-service design experience for lifelike and accurate design of real spaces deeply integrated in the digital shopping journey. A user can use either IKEA inspiration imagery from the digital showroom or their own captured images to place furniture and furnishings, experiment with options, and more. 

“The 3D and AI technology developed by Geomagical Labs will be used to bring out the uniqueness of IKEA digitally,” Phil Guindi, head of products at Geomagical Labs. “This is a vital moment in the IKEA transformation journey as we continue to develop and innovate to meet the customer and their needs, where they are.” 

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How IKEA Kreativ offers AI-driven exploration

Home design can be hard, said Guindi, because people often buy without context, relying on their imagination. “In fact, 87% of our customers say that they want to feel good about their home, but only half of them know how to do it,” he said.

IKEA Kreativ turns room photographs into impressive interactive, “digital playrooms” that anyone can use to explore design ideas. “By understanding a photographed scene in great detail – including the 3D geometry of the scene, the objects in the scene, the lighting in the scene, and the materials in the scene – customers can interactively design room imagery, allowing them to add furniture & wall decor, and remove existing furniture digitally,” he said. 

The core technology is bespoke and proprietary, he said. “Whenever possible, modern open standards and open source were used, rather than licensed or vendor services, to maximize freedom to innovate and minimize lock-in.” he said. 

Both mobile and web applications connect to a scalable, containerized, cloud-based platform of microservices and AI pipelines, hosted by the Google Cloud Platform.

According to Guindi, when a customer scans a room, photography and sensor data from the phone is uploaded to the AI pipeline in the cloud, where it’s processed in a heavily parallelized GPU compute cluster to create wide angle imagery with spatial data to allow client applications to interactively design and edit the scenes. 

“By offloading complex calculations to the cloud, we allow less-expensive, low-powered mobile devices to run complex AI algorithms , and reach more of IKEA’s customers,” he said. 

Neural network technology similar to self-driving cars

The AI for IKEA Kreativ was developed using the same visual AI neural network technologies as self-driving cars, to understand home spaces using visualization at scale, according to the company’s press release. 

Guindi explained that this is similar to self-driving cars because to safely operate, robotic vehicles need to form some understanding of the space around them, called ‘spatial perception’ or ‘scene perception.’ 

“Robotic vehicles use multiple technologies to understand the world around them, such as visual-inertial SLAM to estimate the vehicle’s position in space, stereo vision to estimate depth of pixels in an video image, neural depth estimation to estimate depth from video imagery, and semantic segmentation to recognize and outline important objects in the space,” he said. 

Understanding an indoor scene shares some similarities with a vehicle sensing its environment. The new IKEA digital experience borrows inspiration from these methods – though indoor design applications face unique and difficult challenges. For example, neural network training for vehicular applications won’t work well indoors because rooms and cities look very different, and contain different objects. 

“You need to specially train networks on large volumes of indoor training data to provide usable indoor results,” Guindi said. 

Indoor rooms and 3D computer vision

Indoor rooms are also notoriously hard to geometrically reconstruct by 3D computer vision algorithms because many surfaces are carefully painted to be blank (with no trackable visual features), are shiny (the mirror reflections confused the distance estimators), have repeating factory-made patterns (that confuse visual feature trackers), or fail because rooms are much darker than outside environments.

“Because we implement a mixed-reality solution to harmonize virtual objects with real photography, we need to have a much better understanding of the lighting inside a room,” Guindi explained. “We want to ‘erase objects’ from home photos, so we need technology to be able to estimate the geometry and imagery hidden behind furniture.” And while robotic vehicles can afford expensive sensing hardware such as laser depth sensors, radar, and multi-camera arrays, IKEA values accessibility, he added: “We want everyone to use the applications on everyday smartphones, without requiring exotic or specialized hardware.” 

Once a view is scanned and processed by the Cloud AI pipeline, consumers are able to design a room from anywhere on any device be it their desktop web browser, laptop web browser, and on the IKEA mobile app.

“When they start a design experience, they will be shown an immersive, wide-angle, 3D photo of the scanned room,” Guindi said. Consumers can browse a catalog pane of IKEA products and pick any number of products to add to the room, which will appear inside the photo, with realistic size, perspective, occlusion and lighting. The user can move and rotate products, stack decor accents on top of other products and hang wall art on the walls. Customers can also edit their original room by digitally removing items they may no longer want like an old couch they want to replace.

IKEA Kreativ faced many challenges

IKEA Kreativ faced many challenges before being brought to market, said Guindi. For one thing, it was challenging to bring IKEA products to life in an inspiring and realistic way. 

“This requires detailed estimates of scene lighting and geometry, and requires using 3D graphics rendering to render the materials,” he said. “And this requires producing memory-efficient, visually-beautiful, 3D representations of the IKEA product range art.” 

In addition, IKEA needs to understand a photographed scene accurately enough so the customer can successfully design their space. “This means detecting the existence and 3D location of floors, walls and surfaces where one can place furniture, so they can see them at the right size and perspective,” Guindi explained. For example, that means having foreground objects in the room believably obscure objects that you move behind them. It also includes estimating the light sources in the scene to cast shadows and reflections. 

Improvements to come over time

AI scene perception technology is an actively researched topic and remains a very difficult challenge, Guindi continued. “Today’s product can feel magical, but is not flawless,” he said. “It can get confused, for example, if it does not see much floor, or if the walls are completely blank.” 

Still, IKEA Kreativ “is a big leap forward for IKEA and for our customers, it offers capabilities to customers not previously possible,” he said. “We’re seeing our customers achieve impressive results, and have evaluated the product and technology on hundreds of thousands of diverse rooms where we’ve seen the algorithms work well in the vast majority of cases.” 

Additional improvements will be released over time, he added, including the ability to change wall colors in your own space and add wall and ceiling-mounted furniture, as well as more collaborative ways of designing a home with others.

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Lifestyle Trends

14 Tips for Surviving an IKEA Trip with Your Partner

Posted: May 28, 2024 | Last updated: May 28, 2024

1. Set Realistic Expectations

Before you even step foot in the IKEA parking lot, remind each other that this trip will test your patience more than assembling a 1000-piece puzzle. Understand that finding the perfect coffee table is harder than it looks in the catalog. Embrace the challenge, but know that it’s okay if your living room doesn’t end up looking like a page from the IKEA magazine.

2. Establish a Game Plan

Plan your IKEA adventure like a strategic military operation. Have a clear list of what you need, a map of the store, and maybe even walkie-talkies to stay in constant communication. Remember, the path through IKEA is designed like a labyrinth. One wrong turn and you might end up in the outdoor furniture section, questioning your life choices.

3. Budget Like You’re in Congress

Agree on a budget beforehand, and stick to it like it’s a New Year’s resolution. IKEA can be a wonderland of impulse buys – who doesn’t need a set of 36 tealight candles or a plush shark? But resist the temptation. Your wallet (and relationship) will thank you later.

4. The Art of Compromise

Remember, this trip is a team effort. If your partner falls in love with a bright pink armchair that you find hideous, take a deep breath. Perhaps suggest a less… vibrant option. Finding a middle ground on style is key, unless you’re both into post-modern eclectic chaos.

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5. Embrace the Meatballs

Never, and I mean never, go into IKEA hungry. Those Swedish meatballs aren’t just tasty; they’re relationship savers. A full stomach makes the difference between a calm discussion about curtain colors and a heated debate in the textiles section.

6. Time Your Trip Wisely

Avoid weekends and evenings if possible. Visiting IKEA when it’s as crowded as a rock concert is a recipe for disaster. Aim for a quiet weekday morning when you can have the aisle of bed frames all to yourselves.

7. Take Breaks

IKEA is not just a store; it’s an endurance sport. Schedule breaks to rest, hydrate, and check if you’re still on speaking terms. A quick coffee stop can rejuvenate your spirits and your decision-making abilities.

8. Use Technology

Download the IKEA app. It’s like having a digital sherpa guiding you through the wilderness of Scandinavian design. The app can help you find products, check stock, and maybe even save your relationship with its handy shopping list feature.

9. Be Prepared for Assembly

Remember, after the trip comes the assembly. This is where true character is tested. Have tools ready, read the instructions, and maybe keep a couple of band-aids handy. A sense of humor is also essential when you find yourself with an extra screw and no idea where it goes.

11. Celebrate Small Victories

Managed to agree on a rug? High five each other! Successfully navigated through the marketplace without getting lost? Celebrate with some frozen yogurt. These small wins keep morale high.

12. Respect Each Other’s Tastes

You might not understand your partner’s obsession with minimalist design, and they might not get your penchant for retro decor. That’s okay. IKEA trips are about finding common ground, not converting your partner to your design aesthetic.

13. Avoid the As-Is Section on Your First Trip

The as-is section, where the land of broken dreams and missing parts reside, is not for the faint-hearted or first-timers. Stick to the main showroom and marketplace. The as-is section is for seasoned IKEA veterans only.

14. Remember, It’s About the Journey

At the end of the day, it’s not just about the BILLY bookcase or the MALM dresser. It’s about the experience, the memories, and the story you’ll tell at dinner parties. Surviving IKEA together can be a bonding experience, or at least a good story for your next double date.

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