Royal Delft Innovates Custom Tableware with Augmented Reality Product Design

Driving Brand Differentiation and Engagement with Vuforia Engine

Results

Augmented reality product design helped Royal Delft customers visualize what their custom tableware set will look like. This application differentiated their brand and better engaged customers. Augmented Blueware premiered at Salon del Mobile and won the highly prestigious Dutch Design Awards (in the category Best Client).

Products Used

Vuforia Engine

Challenges

Completely custom, one-of-a-kind products take time and skill to create. It can be difficult for customers to visualize that personalization when creating their unique product.

Opportunity

Royal Delft, established in 1653, is the leading manufacturer of handmade and hand-painted Delft Blue earthenware. They have achieved this through a process of constant innovation and are therefore always looking for new ways to stand out from the competition. They wanted to take customers’ unique designs further and engage potential new buyers.

Solution

Royal Delft worked with their design partner, FLEX\design, and AR developers TWNKLS, to create a new concept of tableware decoration to further their originality.

The result was the Augmented Blueware application. This app takes a unique hand-painted design on a vase and applies it as decoration on top of tableware, creating a truly unique personalized product.

TWNKLS, now part of PTC, created a highly fashionable and high-resolution marker on a dining table that allowed Augmented Blueware to display designs on plates. Vuforia Engine’s robust computer vision enabled the application to detect the sizable high-resolution design marker and allow the camera to lock onto its minimal features. Adding extended tracking to the mix ensured the augmented graphics remained in full effect whenever the user moved in to get a closer look at the designs. This way, the application always retained its slick and sleek presentation.

Vuforia Engine’s Object Targets feature allowed TWNKLS to create a completely new way to interact with the physical content. Pointing the camera at the hand-painted vase and scanning its features triggers a transition animation which reveals a matching set of augmented textures on the crockery.

Augmented Blueware application

Results

The Augmented Blueware application perfectly blends centuries-old tradition with modern design and presents the fusion in a futuristic manner. The application itself can display unlimited designs based on an unlimited amounts of vases. In less than 30 seconds, the vase is scanned, the crockery is located through the tracking, and the designs are layered on top. Customers can now visualize a complete tableware collection that has their own unique design.

The product had its premiere at the prestigious Salon del Mobile, Milan, the world’s largest design fair, and has now also won the highly prestigious Dutch Design Awards (in the category Best Client).

Royal Delft Augmented Blueware application

TWNKLS, now a part of PTC, worked together with Royal Delft to create a unique way to scan vases and transpose their handmade artwork onto porcelain tableware to create a unique but evenly matched set.