Augmented Reality and Retail

Virtual Changing Room in the Real World?

I recently viewed a really interesting demo of augmented reality technology in action – and it got me thinking about the possibilities for virtual fashion at retail.

Augmented Reality is the concept of taking a real-life view of the world and layering in computer generated virtual elements, in real-time.

The particular demonstration I saw was from the Mixed Reality project from Polytechnic University. One of their prototypes is a Dancing Game with a 3D avatar projected into the real-world environment, with the avatar reacting to the real-time movements of the wearer of a VR headset equipped with webcam. Step forward, the avatar dances forward, turn to the right, she twists to the right...



Elements of augmented reality, sans clunky VR headsets, are starting to pop up in everyday life, one example being face-tracking webcams where cat whiskers or pirate hats can be added in real time to video chats. Prototypes are also being explored for use in product and interior design industry.

Of the myriad of future possibilities , one that comes to mind is fashion changing room – not just online but in the real-world at retail. This is in interesting idea, where you can take an everyday shopper and let them to wild and "preview" different items – jeans, shoes, T-shirts, accessories with different colors, textures to see how they match, before trying on or custom tailoring the real item.

We’ve already seen a couple of first-gen examples popping up in high tech retail showcase sites, perhaps the most famous example being the Adidas "Virtual Mirror" at their showcase store on Champs Elysees in Paris. Here, shoppers can see their image projected wearing different model of Adidas trainers in real time.



There is no doubt these can add a lot of engagement and buzz at retail, however for the time being remain complex and expensive setups limited to only a handful of locations .

Despite the promise, there are a number of challenges to do this in the real world: advanced image recognition that can recognise different body parts, the need to take into account different angles and postures, adjusting virtual cloth models around wildly different body shapes (it is the real world after all!), managing clothing layering, and animating as the user moves - to mention a few. This contrasts with the online virtual world using avatars, where the challenges are far less and where fashion mix and match is already happening today.

So the bottom line is that it will still be a while before a full body virtual mirror will appear in a shopping center near you. Progress will come, but not quickly as online.

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Custom Avatar Fashion and GirlSense

Avatar Fashion meets User Generated Content

One of the industry’s big stories for this week was the acquisition of Starnet Interactive by InterActiveCorp, the sprawling empire of diverse web assets including Zwinky, Webfetti and Smiley Central. Starnets main claim to fame is as the developer of successful teen avatar fashion website, GirlSense.

Whilst not as widely known an Internet brand as say Habbo Hotel, Cyworld or the big-hitter in the tween and young teen fashion space - Stardoll, GirlSense has had quite a deal of success. How and why? A lot has to do with their easy to use yet surprisingly deep 2D avatar fashion system, which has helped propel them to close to 15 million registered members.

GirlSense’s Fashion Design studio is a 2D system that provides positioning and layering of different flat fashion items onto the static avatar. Like Stardoll and also Fashion 2.0 mix and match sites such as Polyvore, the success of this approach is in its simplicty.

Unlike SecondLife’s heavyweight separate client download, GirlSense is a simple flash based tool as part of their website. Users drag and drop items such as jeans, skirts, dresses, handbags onto the canvas and position them over the avatar to give the illusion that the avatar is “wearing the item”. In the static pose of the avatar, this works well and lets members have some flexibility to position the item exactly in the right place to suit their style. Want the low rider look? Position the jeans lower down, or wear the baseball cap higher on the head to amp up the hip hop look. Although because the orientation of items is fixed, you can only adjust a little before things start looking off.

The Fashion Design Studio also provides more options, letting users custom “tailor” many aspects of the fashion items. For example, a jacket’s sleeve and collar length could be tweaked, and its color tone, texture changed. Decorations could be added to the items for that more personal touch.

With these tools, endless variations are enabled which contributes to the diversity of “looks” in the user community. Whilst good in this respect, the flipside is that the drawback to this simple 2D approach where items are “faked” to be worn, is that avatars can’t ever be animated and must remain static on the page in the same pose.

What’s the implication? This means the avatar can’t dance around in a game or catwalk competition, or move around in animated emoticons during a chat like is done using the popular 3D chat program IMVU. This is one drawback, and explains why these 2D fashion dolls sites haven’t evolved into deeper virtual worlds, and why both types of approaches exist and are successful.

Regardless, GirlSense is a great example of a growing popularity of the “user generated content” approach to avatar fashion on the net – where users can spend hours styling their avatar fashion to get that pixel-perfect look.

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Fashion 2.0 - Five of the best websites reviewed

Say Hello to Fashion 2.0...

Mention the term Fashion 2.0 to the average person on the street you'll probably bring up a laugh or more likely a confused shrug. However for those who work in the digital industry - it's a concept that makes a lot of sense.

If you think about it - Step 1, take the endless thirst from netizens for fresh fashion content and stylish new products, and Step 2, serve it up using all the powerful new Web 2.0 concepts pioneered by the Flickr, Facebook and YouTube's of the world. User generated content, social collaboration, video, group network and rating and of course, the glamor boy of the Web 2.0 world - mashups. You get the picture. It seems like a combination made in fashion heaven.

Or is it? A buzzword or reality?

We're in early adopter phase today. In the last two years, a number of fresh new fashion community sites have emerged and started to get some mainstream traction with internet users. These sites feature lots of ways for their users to share new styles and tips, discuss, debate, trend-spot and foster a feel good vibe through a whole host of social features. With slick AJAX powered interfaces, and hassle free navigation and sharing, these sites are expanding their audiences and beginning to build a new wave of hardcore and casual fans.

These sites are, on a whole, different from traditional online shopping and e-commerce portals, which have been around since the birth of Amazon, and certainly before the Web 2.0 buzz cycle. Of course at the end of the day though, these sites directly or indirectly encourage a desire to get out and spend money to turn that "must have" thing on the screen into a reality in the owners wardrobe.

In these fashion communities, the focus is on user collaboration and group discussion - "being your own style guru" - or just taking the more laid back approach and checking out what the rest of the community thinks is hot at the moment.

This is a fundamental change from the current model where a small number of fashion elite - the editors and style directors of magazines and the large fashion portals share their views to the masses, to one which is far more community oriented, letting any user to showcase their advice, opinions and trend advice.. and become as popular and as they would like (or at least as far as their writing and style sense take them)

There are a number of strong players coming of age in this new space. Here is a review of five of the best, out in the wild today...

1/ Polyvore

Creativity and simplicity come together in Polyvore a fresh, addictive mix-and-match style community.

The look and feel of Polyvore is white and elegant like a clean canvas, ideal for encouraging users to express their creativity - and that is exactly what they have done. Millions of looks have been created, ranging from the creative, cute, to the artistic to just plain stylish.

Within seconds of landing at the site, users are encouraged to start creating "sets" - a painless process using drag and drop of items either existing on the other sets in the site, or through an simple import process akin to that of ThisNext. The canvas on Polyvore lets users arrange the images, layer them, resize, move and arrange to hearts content. Think Photoshop Lite.

Whilst on the surface the functionality provided in the process is quite limited - for example, there is no rotate or align - this doesn't restrict the creativity greatly. And some deceptively simple functions - particularly the colour picker which lets you instantly find items of a similar certain colour tone / hue you select - are the most powerful, letting you let your artistic talents run wild.

What also differentiates Polyvore is the community, which is extremely positive and supportive. Users find their new set creations are often commented upon by with compliments and feedback. Users can follow others that they like, and be automatically updated when new sets by those fashionistas are published. Whilst it's very possible to just partake in Polyvore passively, viewing the most popular collections, or the top entries in the numerous style competitions run by the site since the launch in 2007, because the barrier to entry to create sets is so low, it's easy to see average users getting involved in the creation process.

With a combination of good feature design and a positive community structure, there is little of the negative hater talk or spam typically seen at other websites. Each item in a set can be clicked to find out the details about the item - and also easily clicked to link directly to the website that it was imported from.

This mechanism also helps set the site up as an effective front end to shopping e-commerce sites, by letting the individual brands and items have their items mashed up by users in interesting design sets. This "soft sell" approach to e-commerce is an effective one from user perspective. Brand logos are not forced down the users throat and the clean interface, free from lots of ad real estate or annoying rich media ads puts the focus on the user created mix and match sets, which allow click through to the different sites. With this approach, the emphasis is for the brands to get involved on Polyvore by importing their own items into the site, and arranging sets to give users a taste of how their accessories and fashions can be styled together.

On the topic of mashups, there are good supporting integration into other websites. Embedding of sets is easy, and lets you highlight your latest within other sites such as blogs. Letting the users take their creations back to the rest of their online daily life and their friends also gives a powerful marketing extension to Polyvore, no doubt contributing to the strong growth in the community they have experienced since launch.

Going forward, Polyvore looks set to build on their good initial community and layer on more tools for creativity and mix-and-match. Done right, they have the potential to break out and become a top-tier fashion destinations on the web, alongside the big media players.

2/ ThisNext

Launched late in 2006, at it's heart, ThisNext is a product recommendation engine that helps users link onto online shopping websites. The emphasis is for users to "shopcast" - that is, make recommendations of items they find on the web, which are then automatically shared with the community.

These recommendations can come from any site including of course e-commerce sites such as Amazon. If the user chooses they can enter their affiliate ID with those sites, and therefore earn commissions through 3rd party purchases of those products. This in itself is not bad, and leads the site to be also used by some people as a marketing channel - for those who want to "pimp" their own products or commission on popular items bought through referral link traffic.
That said, the website still works well, and by using the site and exploring the "top" lists, you can find lots of weird, wonderful and unique products, from fashion through to anything at all, such as this interesting Daft Punk inspired Electronic Helmets. There is also a fun world map-mashup function that shows what are the new things people have recommended from around the world.

Making new recommendations is simple, and can be made either by directly entering in the URL / serial number, or using a browser button that can automatically tag any site currently browsed by the browser. This clever approch makes it easy to capture the spur of the moment "wow that's cool!" feeling that you get when surfing the web sometimes and stumble across something interesting, that you might forget or not be able to navigate back to later.

Recommendations can be tagged, with the expected tag cloud and automatic generation of lists of products and picks associated with a selected tag. Recommendations can also include a custom sticker you add to the photo, allowing some personalisation and personality to come through on the picks.

Custom lists of product recommendations and wishlists are supported, enabling users to browse related or matching products of a common theme easily, and get the feeling for someone's personality and personal style on the site.

ThisNext is very much a web-only play, with only recommendations for those products on the web, and no ability to upload photos to make as recommendations. This does seem a limitation for the style spotters looking to upload photos of new looks snapped in shops or just on the street.

Whilst you can send "compliments" to other users, there are no private messages, chat or forum functions supported for users. However there are Facebook widgets and ability to embed into blogs, expanding the scope of the experience beyond just the ThisNext site.
In this way, the emphasis is around recommending items online that can be ultimately purchased, and less on community interaction. The social functions are quite simple, and you could argue, sufficient for what is a simple product recommendation platform. Users able to subscribe to be friends of other users and follow their recommendations. Actually this is more like becoming a follower rather than friend, as as other person do not have to accept friend invitations for you to add them.

And in a nice gesture to the hardcore fans, users who are active enough can apply to be named "Style Mavens" with special privileges and recognition given to them on the site. It pays to play.

3/ StyleMob

A rating fashion community, StyleMob's visual theme is striking - a quirky, hand-illustrated graphical style which has a 70s Glam Rock style feel. Unlike Polyvore or ThisNext, the main emphasis here is on the users real personal style. With less emphasis on photos of products pulled from around the web and more on looks, the feeling in the community is much more personal, as a result bringing forward the exhibitionist types to the fore.

Once you're through the slightly longwinded registration process and obligitary "invite your Facebook friends" appeal, you're in the site proper, and are encouraged to start creating and rating looks. A look is a photo of yourself or your own things along with description about the look - when, where, why etc... Individual looks submitted are brought together in a Look Book. Although there is an etc category for everything else, the focus is clearly on submitting happy snaps of yourself.

On the home page, a logged in user is then automatically given random "looks" to judge that other members have submitted. Much of the attraction is seeing and rating these widely varying looks from users from many different locales, cultural, sylistic backgrounds. Rating is fun, and the mundane 5 star system is renamed to one that scales from "Not 4 Me" right up to "Wow!" . After submitting your rating, you automatically see how the rest of the "mob" thought (picked a total opposite view to them? you're either not very with it or so far ahead of the curve you stand alone, style maven you). You automatically can see who bubbles to the top of the community every day by viewing the most Mobbed, or most Wow'd. Looks can also be saved by "faving" them, so you don't miss that once in a lifetime (or day) look.

While some revel in the attention of the community attention, if you're the type that are are shy of putting yourself before the "mob" (a lynching anyone?!), then this may not be the right place for you - unless you want to silently lurk and check out the more adventurous.
Social aspects are built out well. Style councils, friends, faves, watchlists, private messages and more are supported in StyleMob. Apart from embedding options for letting your look escape onto the wider web, there are also cleverly disguised viral marketing hooks built in, like the ability to create your own personalised poster "bulletins" as well as badges and widges to attract more friends to join in and get rated.

StyleMob at the end of the day delivers on its name. The Mob does what the Mob does - heap praise on those it deems deserving, lets down those that it doesn't but it's all done in a pretty friendly way, and since its launch in 2007 it's built a diverse and loyal community following - no doubt one reason for it's recent acquisition by Glam Media.

4/ MyItThings

MyItThings has a bit of everything - lifestyle blogging, trend tipping community as well as social network features. It's core service lets members live out their editor aspirations with a chance to create their own "My It Column" - a blog to dish the dirt, express news/views, share new finds with the community and more. As expected columns can be rated by members (called Writers on the site), with the best bubbling to the top.

An interesting twist to the site is that the most interesting and popular columns from users are compiled into "magazines", ranging from Fashion and Body to Entertainment and even Technology. Whilst billed as a 100% user generated magazine, several posts were created by staff from MyItThings, so it's really a mix of bite-size user and editorial content, which gives members a good read.

Apart from column writing, there are many other features... in fact perhaps a couple too many, as some such as Video don't seem relevant to the core experience. There is the ability to upload your own designs to the site for others to see and rate. There is a "My It Closet" which are basically tagged photos uploaded to the site arranged into different categories, including a Wishlist of items desired by the user. There are other social features including ability to upload videos and even, in a loving Facebook homage, a Wall function. As expected there are Widgets that let members publish their MyItThings content, particularly the Column to other blogs and social networks, increasing the reach of the site.

The business model is advertising driven with potential for some referral commission to products purchased in linked external sites. From the user perspective, one interesting take is an ad revenue scheme for those prolific writers (10 or more posts) where 100% of the click through ad revenue on their content pages is given back to the user via their Google AdSense account.

Even if that only applies to the small minority, this serves as a motivation to encourage good content creators to get active on the platform, which in turn is used to help attract mainstream users to the site to view content, if not create it themselves. It will be interesting to see how this dynamic plays out, and the content and community grow over the next year and beyond.

5/ StyleHive

If fashion is a cult, StyleHive is its online incarnation. On this full featured site, members can sign up to "follow" other stylish hivers, with some of the most popular members building a personal following of many thousands of fans.

Hivers are automatically updated on all the new postings and news from their followed style leaders, who can also send fashion "tips" to their followers. Notification of new style news (called "events") are also sent by email by default, which can border on spam when the number of updates from your followed hivers increases. You can always opt out, but this could be viewed as an annoyance factor for new users.

Users can create their own "saves" of favourite bookmarks - think Digg Lite, as well as set up a wishlist of items. There are a number of well implemented social features including private messages, forums, activity feeds similar to Facebook mini-feed, friends lists and more. It even features a "Linked-In" like notification on how "complete" your profile is. (You know, the "your profile is 70% complete, fill in some business recommendations to get to complete your profile" deal.)

Similar to the MyItThings magazine, there is a HiveDaily fashion report which contains user generated content and lets users make comments and start discussions. There is also a Style Diary.

Some well known retail brands including Gap are active on the site, as it also helps generate users with purchase intention to the brands own e-commerce store. StyleHive has a "buy it" button for items posted, which redirects to the third party site. This forms a key part of the business model, in addition to advertising revenue from banner and leaderboard ads on the site.
You can see the most poular product items and corresponding referred sites within StyleHive, with etsy.com, net-a-porter.com and neimanmarcus.com at the top of the daily rankings at the time of the writing. It's easy to see why a brand would want to get involved in a site like StyleHive - for minimal or no cost, this forms a effective way to get more products and buzz out to an important audience or online-trend setters.

Summary

Whist each of these sites are unique and vary in their approach, they share a common thread - building up a new community, giving the web 2.0 generation of fashion and lifestyle lovers a place online to share and explore.

Whilst this space is new, there is little doubt the concept of harnessing the community -the power of the mob, and applying it to the fashion & lifestyle vertical has real potential.

It's an interesting time in the industry. Watch this space...

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