Ikea and Space10 launch Everyday Experiments, exploring how tech might change our homes

Ikea’s design and research lab Space10 has enlisted a group of leading design and technology studios, including ManvsMachine and Field, to envision how tech might change the way we interact with our homes. The series of 18 digital prototypes are congregated on a dedicated website, EverydayExperiments.com, where highlights include a speaker that visualises sound on the surfaces around it, and a giant inflatable elephant that expands to measure an interior space.

The project sets out to explore how our homes “can be experienced in extraordinary ways through the means of technology,” using AI, machine learning, augmented reality and spatial intelligence. While the results are hypothetical for now, the experiments come under Space10’s remit to explore potential futures of the home environment, spark discussion and inspire real projects for Ikea.

The experiments range from practical to fun; for example Random Studio has made Home Puzzle, an app that lets you scan your space and quickly rearrange the furniture on your screen, and Hidden Characters, an AR app which gives users the chance to add facial features to their furniture.

Additionally, Field has made several experiments on the platform: Extreme Measures, Spatial Instruments and Fort Builder. Extreme Measures is the aforementioned measuring elephant, a project that uses spatial mapping, AR and object detection technologies as a “friendly, unexpected way of sensing dimension and volume”. With this tool, a user could virtually place an elephant anywhere in their home to ‘inflate’ and measure that space. Spatial Instruments uses LiDAR technology to scan and build a model of your room, and use it as an interactive instrument, while Fort Builder lets you digitally build a fort out of everything in your house, then knock it all down without fear of breakage.

ManvsMachine’s design Optical Soundsystem on the other hand, would allow users to choose a speaker in their home and generate real-time visualisations of the sounds they’re listening to on the surfaces surrounding it. Another experiment by the studio called Light Filters imagines an AR app that allows you to see what your room looks like in different light conditions, considering time of day, point of direction, weather patterns, and even the impact of moving that space to another location around the world, for example a mountain top in India. The studio commented: “The main difficulty was keeping everything grounded in what could be possible within the constraints of near-future technology”.

More experiments from other contributing studios including Bakken & Baeck, Cirg, Philip Pries Hennigsen, Strømlin, Set Snail, Alonso Holmes and Timi Oyedeji can also be explored on EverydayExperiments.com.