THE VIRTUAL FITTING ROOM -

Posted on August 1, 2008 by Asi Erenberg

Making an online shopping trip more and more like the “real” thing

A lot of wild and wonderful predictions are being made about how computer-use is going to totally transform the shopping experience. Totally transformative changes have happened already – not least the way that customers looking for goods or services now automatically turn in their masses to a search engine (usually Google) to find them. The use of the Search function is leaping upward at the phenomenal rate of 20% a year, and it’s brand-new users who mostly account for that growth. Existing users, for their part, are boosting their use by 25% year. Virtual fitting room

But when it comes to the nitty-gritty of allowing customers to make a real-world choice between specific items on offer, some of the wilder fantasies of web enthusiasts remain just that - fantasies.

On the other hand, I’ve already got some experience of letting a customer decide in a real-world kind of way on just exactly what s/he wants, when confronted with a range of similar-looking options in the virtual, on-line world. For instance the fantasy with online clothes-shopping is that in your own bedroom you could step in front of some kind of elaborate web-cam (or web-cams), and have your body-image transmitted to the online clothes-store you’re visiting, and as if by magic your 3-D image, maybe even a hologram of sorts, would be clothed in the correct size of garment, and you get to see if its color and cut really suit you or not.

Well that ideal is still some ways away. But I know already that it can work, because - employing a bit more realism and present-day practicality - I’ve helped an eyeglasses store to give its customers a highly refined form of comparison-testing.

The customers get to “try on” different choices of glasses by uploading their photo; the images of different frames and lenses are “fitted” to their face, right down to the exact placement on the bridge of the nose, or below it, depending on individual taste and comfort. And of course this all gives a highly accurate indication of just how the glasses would work in real life.

And we’re on the way to more complete visualization. Zafu.com, the niche search engine for woman’s jeans and other clothing, already asks its customers a set of detailed questions, through drop-down menus and buttons, about how much their waistbands might gape, whether they want to disguise their “saddlebags”, whether they have full or slim thighs, as well as obvious matters like general size and preferred brands of jeans, and so on. Then the store’s database is raided to produce typically a range of seven or eight suitable pairs of jeans to pick from.

Very soon we can expect Zafu, or a competitor in the same line of business, to offer a major technical advance. This will enable the customer to upload a video of herself, captured according to specific criteria – which will help her see, in a 360 degree visualization, just how a pair of jeans would fit on her own frame. It’s a tool similar to the WII Xbox application developed for gaming, but re-imagined as that ideal virtual fitting-room we’ve dreaming of. And that customer will be able to test out just which accessories (handbags, belts etc) look best on her, along with those jeans being “tried on”.

Fantastical? The province of science fiction? Not any more.

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1 Comment so far

Ilan August 23, 2008 3:44 am

Great article.
I have to say that I feel not many understand the full potential of what is known as the “information revolution”.

When you grasp that everything around us, including ourselves is basically information - can be presented in some sort of informational structure (DNA?), to be copied, transferred, manipulated etc, you understand that the possibilities are endless.

The cool user experience applications you mentioned in your article are just the tip of the ice. If we will look a bit further, I believe we will see a time where the line between “virtual” and “real” will be almost invisible if not existing at all.

The World is Flat
Tom Friedman (the author of "The Lexus and the Olive Tree") book about the big internet effect on Globalization
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