Last week, it was revealed that Ikea has been with us since the Late Middle Ages, hiding pieces like MALM and LACK in the work of Hieronymus Bosch and his contemporaries. Now, Co.Design points to a June article in CGSociety that ballparks the furniture giant's use of computer generated imagery in its product catalogues at about 75 percent. Hear that? It's the sound of affordable flat-pack Swedish minimalism speeding the onset of an all-digital future where the idea of a photograph is about quaint as that of a "book."
Over the last eight years, Ikea has been incrementally making the shift over to digital to cut costs. Ikea's approach—constructing virtual models at an astoundingly high def 4K-by-4K pixels, and mapping in textures scanned from the real thing at a 1:1 scale—also gives them a previously unreachable level of control over the lighting of scenes, so much so that in some cases, photographed sets are digitally recreated in their entirety. More factoids about this impressive process, this way.
· Building 3D with Ikea [CGSociety via Co.Design]
· All Ikea coverage [Curbed National]