It's almost impossible to photograph real rooms with furniture without a Lot of distortion, and with traditional photography there is a lot of compensation: angling furniture, tipping up the rear legs on blocks, etc. to make it look like the eye would see it. To display furniture this is probably much easier than setting up real rooms.

It's not "Photoshop" ... it's a 3-D rendering program.

Far faster and easier than a traditional photo shoot, and as IKEA points out, they don't have the waste of making and disposing of sets, transport, etc.

Most of their stuff is designed in 3-d modelling software, made by computer-controlled equipment, so they already have the information it takes to get good rendering for catalogs.

Interesting. A newly renovated and empty house in my neighborhood has been on the market for a while. I noticed they just added furniture to the pictures in the listing. At first I thought they staged, but then I realized it was photoshopped in. The pictures do look better. It was a good idea.

Just another sign of the times and the computer generated era we're living in. Things are not always what they seem.