The Universitat de València’s Instituto de Robótica y Tecnología de las Comunicaciones (IRTIC), located at Parc Científic, has developed an innovative low cost system of presentation of ceramic products combining virtual reality and augmented reality technologies. The institute has been working for two years in the project, which is financed by TAU CERÁMICA. The tile manufacturer hopes to integrate this system in the short term in its stores.
As in other industrial sectors like the wood, toy or textile sectors, the way the product is presented is vital for sales purposes. Customers not only demand new products but new ways of presentation, and they use to react differently to different product presentations. The tile companies know that tiles and other ceramic pieces presentation is a big asset when buying a product against any proposal coming from a strong competition. But, having into account the annual losses of 15% of the sector over the last years, any technological innovation has to be very quality-price balanced.
For this reason, The Universitat de València’s Instituto de Robótica y Tecnología de las Comunicaciones (IRTIC), located at Parc Científic, has developed an innovative low cost system of presentation of ceramic products combining virtual reality and augmented reality technologies. The institute has been working for two years in the project, which is financed by TAU CERÁMICA. The tile manufacturer,one of the biggest in Europe, hopes to integrate this system in the short term in its stores. TAU CERÁMICA was founded in 1967 and it has the broadest range of ceramic products in Spain. Nowadays, it has more than 500 employees and its productos are exported to more than 100 countries.
The new computer system has a contactless point of sales with a 50 inches screen, which is controlled by a device similar to Microsoft Kinect. This allows the custemer to visualize the TAU’s ceramics collection (based on a photorealistic image) without touching anything in the point of sales and even using real pieces with QR-CODE tags. The product selection and information can be obtained from an innovative gestural and multimodal interface developed by IRTIC for Kinect devices. Complementing the point of sales, the application has been migrated for its use in devices as Ipad2, Android (Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, Motorola Xoom 10, Sony Tablet S, etc.). This migrations have been done thanks to innovative techniques of high resolution image visualization for mobile devices. The applications are available and can be downloaded on Android Market and Apple Store.
The presentation of this new system is due for next February the 7th on the occasion of the 30th edition of the international ceramics fair, Feria Internacional de la Cerámica.
Last update: 14 de january de 2012 07:12.
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