When you design a table or a chair, you need to worry about a number of different things. How sturdy is it? Is it going to look pretty in your kitchen or dining room or restaurant? How resistant is it to rips, scratches, spills and other mishaps?
But if you didn’t need to worry about the appearance of your furniture, you’d have an easier time of it. You would only need to be concerned with its mechanical properties.
If we assume that people will generally be wearing their extended reality glasses in the future, then furniture design becomes easier. The raw appearance of your table or chair won’t matter, because nobody will see it in its naked state.
Suddenly your choice of materials and methods of construction widens. Manufacturing becomes easier. And you can change the color of your furniture — as well as your wallpaper color for that matter — in a moment.
Of course you could choose to take off your extended reality glasses and see the naked reality beneath. But I suspect that may not be something people in the future will be doing in polite company,.
There will still be a few important physical / shape / design properties to be taken into account though – for example if someone prefers to look at rounded edges it will still hurt if they walk into the kitchen table’s physical hard 90° corner.
Ok, so you make it ALL rounded corners, like with children’s furniture. But now unfortunately the attempt to put your coffee mug down right in the corner of the table (that’s for the person who prefers the classic rectangular design) results in the mug dropping to the floor…
These examples might seem silly at first, but there is a plethora of practical problems emerging if everyone sees the same physical space differently.