Spatial Commerce
A virtual kitchen that you can see, personalize, and feel
Imagine a future in which you can design the kitchen of your dreams, experience every visual detail, and even experience a sense of touch with the materials and appliances – before you buy and without ever leaving your home.
At Lowe’s Innovation Labs, we’re prototyping this future today.
What it is
Infinite Kitchen Touch is a prototype experience that lets users navigate a fully rendered kitchen in virtual reality – and explore and customize it with their own hands, using advanced haptic gloves from HaptX.
Remodeling or refreshing a kitchen can be complicated
There are many decisions to be made, from selecting the appliances you need to choosing the countertops or cabinet finishes that look best in your home, and deciding where you might want to set up a new island.
Ultimately, figuring out how all these individual choices fit together is one of the most significant decisions of them all.
People turn to Lowe’s to guide them in making their kitchen design decisions.
Home improvement is inherently tactile
With Infinite Kitchen Touch, we’re building on our past work and taking a step into the future: a world in which virtual environments can deliver physical sensations.
Lowe’s Innovation Labs has conducted a variety of explorations into how virtual and extended reality experiences can transform the art of kitchen design and boost our customers' confidence and delight in the process.
How it works
Infinite Kitchen Touch is all about tactile sensation and immersion
Infinite Kitchen Touch features a specially designed haptic UI, built in-house at Lowe’s Innovation Labs.
Through our relationship with HaptX, we’re exploring how next-generation haptic gloves might improve how our customers navigate a virtual experience – not only with how they see and hear it, but also how they feel it.
The experience places users at the center of a functional, modern, virtual kitchen, not unlike one you could customize and buy at Lowe’s.
Armed with HaptX gloves, which contain microfluidic actuators that provide detailed tactile feedback to the hands and fingers, you’re immediately invited to treat this virtual kitchen as you would your own.
Virtually open the fridge; turn on the stove; and make tea. Open virtually any door and interact with a wide range of appliances.
You can change countertops, apply new cabinet finishes, choose entirely new kitchen styles, and much more – using your actual hands in virtual reality.
Overall, these elements plus haptic gloves come together to create an immersive virtual kitchen experience that is like no other
While these technologies are likely years away from reaching consumers at home and in-store, we’re encouraged by the possibility of this technology to make online planning and shopping for a home project more inspirational, more delightful – and more real.
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