IKEA Imagines A ‘Never-Ending’ Catalog & Virtual Inflatable Elephant For Homes

Apart from acceding all your requests for home solutions through its multifaceted array of furniture, IKEA has been toying with unexpected technologies with its research and design firm, SPACE10. Its latest project is Everyday Experiments, a hub of 18 experiments created to redefine home design and introduce more decision-making tools.

A notable project is Extreme Measures by London-based specialized creative studio FIELD, which literally puts the elephant in the room. The experiment envisions an inflatable, colorful AR elephant as a measuring device to help you gauge space in your living room via your phone’s LiDAR feature.

Another prototype by machine learning engineer Philip Pries Henningsen imagines a Neverending Catalogue that offers virtually endless interior design and redecoration ideas. The generative adversarial network (GAN) was fed with existing photographs of rooms from IKEA’s catalog to train it to generate a stream of concepts that don’t turn out quite perfectly, though these flaws are expected to help fuel your imaginaton.

“Even with obvious errors, the wild, unpredictable scenes the algorithm is capable of dreaming up could still be used as inspiration,” IKEA explains.

You can find out more about the hub’s 18 stellar projects here.