The Virtual Apartment in the Kaindl Floor House has created a state-of-the-art way for the company to present its product line. AREA Interior Design came up a virtual residential arrangement in which Kaindl floor treatments can be viewed in real-time 3D.
Both stations—one executed as a large-scale projection; the other a somewhat handier screen variant—make it possible to evaluate both currently available products as well as innovative new lines and prototypes before they’ve even gone into production. In this connection, Kaindl’s in-house staff now has the option of
integrating new designs into the application at any time, whereby Kaindl’s predominantly digital production processes provide an excellent point of departure for delivering visualizations that come very close to reality.

Serving as the interface are real floor treatment patterns, which guarantee that the images are almost identical to the real products, and also deliver a very realistic feel of the depicted surfaces. Small sections of flooring studded with RFID chips are placed onto the interface console, and this triggers the laying of the new flooring. The customer can now move about freely in the Virtual Apartment, modify the lighting situation and view the surface structure from all possible angles and distances in order to get a comprehensive impression of how the flooring works with respect to space and light. These impressions would otherwise be available only in a specially constructed, modifiable showroom with enough space for each type of floor covering.
Realistically depicting the different varieties of flooring posed a particular challenge. In addition to accommodating subtle surface textures, diffuse reflections and special color characteristics such as glittering particles, consideration also had to be given to realistic automatic application of the floor. Accordingly, the basis for each floor treatment is delivered by the same digital graphics that are used for the production process itself.
The Virtual Apartment serves as one successful example for the forward-looking implementation of VR-technologie in effective sales promotion.