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These clothes were designed by artificial intelligence

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A US firm has used machine learning to create a "little black dress". Is this the future of fashion?

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Robby Barrat - one of the first AI artists who implemented AI into fashion design 

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Robby Barrat - one of the first AI artists who implemented AI into fashion design 

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'The blurring of our physical and digital lives is going to lead to fashion shows that are markedly different from the traditional runway of the past.'

AI is widely used in fashion logistics, statistics and trend predictions yet its creative application has only been explored by a few  in the fashion industry.

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The models' futuristic-looking clothes, designed in a collaboration between fashion house Acne Studios and artist and programmer Robbie Barrat, were designed by an artificial intelligence (AI).

'When you design a collection, you have an idea of what a jacket looks like, or a pair of trousers,' says Jonny Johansson, creative director of Acne Studios.

'The computer doesn't know what a jacket is. It tries to learn from the images we gave it, and then creates its own idea. It was freeing, because we could then design a jacket that's like from a parallel universe.'

Barrat is well known in the world of AI, or generative, art. Two years ago, code he devised was used to create an artwork that sold at Christie's for £337,000 - the first of its kind.

Since then, Barrat's method, a form of machine learning called a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN), has been used in a range of creative pursuits, from helping write albums to automating CGI .

But high fashion design is just a small part of the total fashion industry, a trade spanning supply chains to style suggestion to large scale manufacturing.

AI, and its subset of neural network-powered machine learning, is set to transform how we wear and consume clothes and in the process, might even help improve the planet.

Though Acne Studios' futuristic clothes were the first examples of AI on the catwalk, startups have been playing with GAN-generated clothes for far longer.

What is a Generative Adverserial Network?

Machine learning is a kind of artificial intelligence that uses vast quantities of data to predict, or learn about, certain outcomes, without being preprogrammed.

A neural network is a series of algorithms that works a bit like the human brain. They're used in machine learning to spot patterns by comparing a template to new data.

A g enerative adverserial network (GAN) is a kind of machine learning system, where one neural network trains another. It typically consists of a "generator" network, which creates random versions of an image, for example, and a second "discriminator" network, which judges how accurate the generated images are, according to its own criteria.

On a larger scale, Indian fashion business Myntra used their in-house AI-powered software Ratatouille to suggest new clothing designs, cutting the design process from six months to one.

'It throws up questions around what the relationship is between designer and neural network,' says Matthew Drinkwater, head of London College of Fashion's Innovation Agency.

'Is it the computer designing, or do you use it as a collaborative tool?'

It's unsettling to think your clothes may have been designed by something not human, but it's far from the only aspect of the fashion industry to be affected by algorithms.

When the Amazon Echo Look was announced three years ago, with its ability to algorithmically decide between outfits you wear, many observers envisioned a new era of computer-chosen style choices.

It wasn't inconceivable to imagine a world in which an AI-powered recommendation advice, like the Look, suggested a piece from an AI-designed clothing range, like Acne Studios' new offering.

Amazon's drones would then carry out the delivery, and the only human involved in the process will be the postman carrying it to your door.

Even the models that showcased those AI-generated clothes were threatened with becoming obsolete - virtual influencers like Miquela attract millions of followers and tens of millions of pounds.

But in reality, the uptake by the fashion industry at large has been much slower.

'There's a huge universe of [AI] categories that are being created at the moment, and the fashion industry is the last one to adapt to it,' says Hasna Kourda, CEO and founder of Save Your Wardrobe.

'The industry has been very skeptical about the digital world as a whole - not just AI,' Kourda tells Metro.co.uk.

'It's taken them decades to just have a website, an e-commerce or even a landing page.'

However, the pace of take-up for AI and machine learning-powered tech has begun to increase.

'We crawl the web for fashion photography very much like Google does for information,' says Kostas Koukoravas, CEO and founder of Intellistyle.

'We focus specifically on fashion imagery, looking at images put together by human stylists on social media, in catalogues and retailers' websites, and then use that imagery to analyze and understand what style means.'

Concepts of style and what's considered 'in fashion' aren't just human anymore.

Instagram likes, Twitter hashtags, and Google-distributed display advertising are just as, if not more, influential on what people buy than a magazine editor or fashion designer.

'The AI's understanding of customers' styling preferences quite often outperforms human stylists,' Koukoravas tells Metro.co.uk.

'We were at London Fashion Week last year and pitted our AI against the choices of human stylists and asked the audience to select which one they like best.'

'About 70% of the audience preferred combinations that the AI provided.'

But if you're preparing yourself for getting your next clothing recommendation from a machine, then you might want to think again.

Your most likely interaction might not be with the machine itself, but with a person assisted by the AI.

''When you have a human recommending something to a customer, it has much better results,' says Koukoravas.

'AI still doesn't have the empathy or the communication abilities that humans have.'

Better picked clothes could help the fast fashion industry be more sustainable, too.

A study by Marks and Spencer found that adults in the UK only regularly wear 44 percent of the clothing they own.

In theory, better chosen clothes and suggestions on how to wear them might reduce the 3.6 billion unworn clothes left in the nation's wardrobes.

'We're looking at it from the perspective of "Can AI help you make the right decisions"', says Koukoravas.

'As opposed to going out and buying something mindless and coming back home and thinking "Hey, I haven't got anything to match it with."'

As Christopher Wylie, the whistleblower turned H&M data scientist, told a fashion conference last year, 'producing less will get you more.'

'You walk into stores on the high street across the country and typically they'll have identical products,' says Matthew Drinkwater, head of London College of Fashion's Innovation Agency.

'But it doesn't make sense that consumers in one location, let's say in the West End of London, would be buying the same things as perhaps on the south coast or in Cornwall.'

Products like Intellistyle and Save Your Wardrobe's AI-powered suggestive technology, based on clothes that you already own, aim to help reduce the crisis.

'More and more people are aware of their wasteful consumer behaviors,' says Save Your Wardrobe CEO Hasna Kourda.

'They're taking a stand against that and are looking for tools to help them make better decisions.'

'It really allows people to focus more on the creative aspect [of fashion], as opposed to some of the more mundane and repetitive work,' says Intellistyle's Koukoravas.

'Humans will always have a need to be creative, but AI will support that.'

While warnings of large job redundancies have loomed large, many in the industry, like Koukoravas and Kourda, are more optimistic about the potential for change.

'Maybe one day it will be everybody's tool. I don't know where it's going, we just wanted to try it and see if it works,' says Johnasson.

Do you have any tips about the way technology is transforming industry?

Leave a comment below about what you'd like us to look at next.

Get your need-to-know latest news, feel-good stories, analysis and more

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Will we all be wearing clothes designed by artificial intelligence?

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The models' futuristic-looking clothes, designed in a collaboration between fashion house Acne Studios and artist and programmer Robbie Barrat, were designed by an artificial intelligence (AI). 'When you design a collection, you have an idea of what a jacket looks like, or a pair of trousers,' says Jonny Johansson, creative director of Acne Studios.

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How do you teach a robot to create? Can it design beauty? Has a nineteen-year-old stumbled upon the next stage of fast fashion: a version of the industry that doesn't necessarily need a human touch at all?

Robbie Barrat (@DrBeef_) is a prodigy. I hate introducing him like that-it's reductive-but he is definitely at least that. Being a nineteen-year-old genius working in a research lab at Stanford University certainly lends itself to the qualification. He went from high school in West Virginia to working in San Francisco at NVIDIA, after his Kanye West-emulating neural network (that writes rap songs based on the latter's entire discography) caught the attention of an exec. He has yet to attend college as a student, though he does research at Stanford University's Center for Biomedical Informatics Research and guest lectures for Continuing Studies classes on artificial intelligence. Oh, and he's self-taught.

He is more than smart-he's one of the most exciting artists working with artificial intelligence right now. And his skill set spans industry: besides his Kanye West AI, he's created a guide on how to use plant-based electricity to create generative art and an AI that writes piano melodies in the likeness of Bach. And the AI-generated painting that just sold at Christie's for over $400,000? The artists borrowed Barrat's code. He's also written an AI that generates ur- Balenciaga -lest you get litigious, it's not really a bootleg, just possibly the nerdiest love-letter to a brand a fan has ever made.

Dystopian survivalists need not worry. Barrat's Balenciaga AI is a continual work of conversation, experimentation, and curation-just like analog designing so often is. The silhouettes are legitimate, but the gradients are unearthly and fragmented, with often no delineation between where the "human" model stops and the clothing begins. Sometimes it eerily perfects variations of what's really gone down the runway and sometimes-the best times-it ekes out the most bizarre and joyful spacey surprises. The results of the AI are weird and, yes, beautiful. They are Balenciaga, if you threw all their collections into an atomizing time machine and asked an alien on the other side to reconstruct the originals from the scrambled remains. Alternate-reality Balenciaga. Maybe future Balenciaga. Demna, are you listening?

Arabelle Sicardi

Robbie Barrat

"Maybe a designer could hit a button, and it would generate a new outfit."

It side-steps the ethical dilemma that I always had with pattern recognition software, too. Instead of teaching something that could be used to survey marginalized people, you're just creating cool stuff. All of the models in these generative software have no actual faces, so it's not learning faces and assuming the bias we typically codify into face recognition software.

The Department of Defense is always contracting these huge companies like Google to use their existing machine running software and they use it for something awful like drones. But working with AI and generative art is nice because people can't really misuse your software or your results. I totally agree.
I have had a few people message me very concerned about my work, though. They think that it's going to automate away artists. It's really not. AI is going to be good for artists. Instead of automating them away, I think we're going to get a ton of really sick artists' tools that are powered by machine learning and AI. It is augmenting artists' creativity. Maybe a designer could hit a button, and it would generate a new outfit. They could look through those and get an idea to implement in their own practice.

A lot of work right now is self-referencing in a way that already feels algorithmic. When you actually put an algorithm in your hands, it forces you to create versions and derivatives. It draws conclusions you wouldn't have considered, because it lacks the context that may inhibit you. It's helping forward the process along without devaluing it. Maybe this is a completely different version of fast fashion.

Like surreal, infinite fashion. There's no limit to how many outfits this AI model can generate. A lot of them might be highly similar, but you can generate infinite an amount. It has the potential to be infinitely fast fashion. Although I wouldn't want that, because fast fashion sucks.

[ Laughs] That's why this is so fun to me. You don't have to be a fashion expert to create this. You're coming at it from a different vantage point.

A big part of my role in this collaboration with the machine is really that of a curator, because I'm curating the input data that it gets, and then I'm curating the output data that the network gives me and choosing which results to keep, and which to discard. All of the results are pretty good. A lot of them look like normal Balenciaga, and I don't really consider that the point. The point is to train the network on Balenciaga and see if it will generate something different, to see if it will misinterpret Balenciaga.

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How do you teach a robot to create? Can it design beauty? Has a nineteen-year-old stumbled upon the next stage of fast fashion: a version of the industry that doesn't necessarily need a human touch at all? Robbie Barrat (@DrBeef_) is a prodigy. I hate introducing him like that-it's reductive-but he is definitely at least that.

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It's a fanciful little one-piece in shimmering green and aquamarine with bold fuschia shoulder accents - perfect for a night out on the town. Is this a new dress from a Milan or Tokyo collection? Nope, it was designed by an AI-powered machine, and produced by a couple of MIT graduates.

Pinar Yanardag and Emily Salvador recently launched their fashion brand Coven.ai, aiming to reimagine dress design with the help of an artificial intelligence technique called Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs).

Pattern drafting is the first and most important step in dressmaking. Designers typically start with a general sketch on paper; add styles, elements and colors; revise and refine everything; and finally deliver their design to dressmakers. Coven.ai accelerates this time-consuming and labour-intensive process by having GANs automatically generate pattern designs.

The company's AI algorithms have so far produced two designs: the shimmering party dress and a more formal black number with pointy shoulders, an asymmetrical neck and a single bell sleeve.

The Coven.ai team first trained an AI model to randomly generate thousands of sewing patterns; then selected a few designs based on their tastes; and finally assembled fabrics and other materials to realize the design.

At the heart of the process is StyleGAN (Style-based Generative Adversarial Network), an AI algorithm NVIDIA introduced last year that has filled the internet with those highly convincing fake images of human faces, cats, landscapes and so on. StyleGAN represents an alternative generator architecture that draws insights from style transfer techniques. The algorithm can learn and separate different aspects of an image unsupervised; and enables intuitive, scale-specific control of the synthesis. To train StyleGAN so it can learn how to synthesize new dress designs, the Coven.ai team built a dataset of nearly 30,000 high-resolution dress patterns downloaded from 10 websites.

The inspiration for Coven.ai came from How To Make Almost Anything, a popular MIT course that Yanardag and Salvador attended last summer. The course provides a hands-on introduction to cutting-edge technologies - 3D printing, laser cutting, electronics, and more - for designing and fabricating smart systems.

A former postdoctoral associate at MIT Media Lab with extensive experience in machine learning, Yanardag initiated the project How To Generate Almost Anything to create novel pizza recipes, songs, dresses, perfumes, screenplays, graffiti, and even viruses - all using AI algorithms. Encouraged by the results, Yanardag and Salvador decided to focus the process on dresses, believing AI-powered fashion could have potential.

Coven.ai has thus far produced 100 affordable AI-designed dresses, and are planning to launch a kickstarter campaign for fundraising. The company also wants to enable the creation of personalized dresses based on individual customer taste. "We are working on adopting StyleGAN and adding personalization directly as a feedback loop to the algorithm so that the stuff it is generating will be automatically designed to fit your style," says Yanardag.

The creation of Coven.ai was not intended to replace fashion designers. Yanardag says Coven.ai is considering building an AI tool that could help reduce fashion designers' workloads, for example by automatically previewing a wide range of patterns and styles in a particular design, etc. The Coven.ai team has also collected a number of 1920s Bergdorf Goodman sketches from the Metropolitan Museum of Art's internet archive and used these to produce regenerated dress designs using style transfer, an AI technique for recomposing images in the style of other images.

Eugena Delman, founder of New York fashion business AVA James, seconds the idea that AI can find a fit in fashion: "From a process perspective, if we could also automate the pattern or the fit process, we would love that as well. Pattern development is not cheap and it feels like getting the fit right should be automated... Utilizing AI as part of our creative process ... could also generate designs that have never been done before, which is really exciting," Delman told Synced.

Yanardag and Salvador say the main challenge they are facing is their non-fashion backgrounds. A fashion line needs more than just appealing designs to build a lasting business - effective manufacturing, retailing, marketing, and of course fundraising also play key roles. To hone these skills Yanardag has been attending fashion school on weekends and is seeking talents with fashion business experience.

The pair speculate that one reason AI has yet to be deployed in fashion may be because the tech field is highly male-dominated - something Yanardag says they'd like to change: "We want to be role models in this area, showcase these kinds of technologies and hopefully you know, inspire some other humans!"

Journalist: Tony Peng | Editor: Michael Sarazen

Machine Intelligence | Technology & Industry | Information & Analysis

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Is the Fashion World Ready for AI-Designed Dresses?

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It's a fanciful little one-piece in shimmering green and aquamarine with bold fuschia shoulder accents - perfect for a night out on the town. Is this a new dress from a Milan or Tokyo collection? Nope, it was designed by an AI-powered machine, and produced by a couple of MIT graduates.

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Cross&Freckle is a New York based fashion start up which produces black and white unisex t-shirts with a neural network  generated embroidery. Brands name, logo, and even marketing campaign words was entirely generated by AI.

At this moment the industry of fashion already quite heavily relies on the AI technologies  such as for managing inventory, marketing (suggesting  the right product to customers online) and the use of  Virtual stylist apps .

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The T-shirts sold by Cross & Freckle, a New York-based fashion upstart, don't look revolutionary at first glance. They come in black or white, they're cut for a unisex fit, and they sell for $25. Each of them has a little design embroidered into the cotton that references staples of New York City life: pigeons, dollar pizza slices, subway rats.

Sarah McBride, the brand's cofounder, likens the T-shirts to "the New York City summer uniform." But McBride didn't actually design the shirts. Neither did anyone else. They were designed instead by a neural network, which crunched doodle data from millions of people and spit out the original art that makes up the embroidery.

Cross & Freckle isn't the first company to use AI to generate art-people have been doing that for years. But this project offers a glimpse into the nascent world of AI-generated fashion, where designers use machine-learning models to remix and riff on old designs. Cross & Freckle doesn't just use AI to create its designs; it also got the brand's name and logo from a neural net, called the Hipster Business Name Generator and used an AI text generator to create the mumbo-jumbo marketing copy on the company's website. It's a new model for a brand that relies entirely on AI.

The embroidered designs look like something a child might have scribbled with a crayon, or something an adult might have drawn with a computer mouse on Microsoft Paint. That's actually not far off: The graphics came out of a variational autoencoder trained on data from Google Creative Lab's game , which has collected over a million doodles from people around the world. Quick, Draw works like Pictionary: Draw a giraffe or a light bulb or a slice of pizza, and the computer guesses what it is. In aggregate, the drawings make up what Google calls the "world's largest doodling data set."

Paul Blankley, who handles Cross & Freckle's technical side, created the autoencoder and fed it doodles of pigeons, rats, pizza, and dogs from Google's data set. "There are hundreds of thousands of drawings for each of the different categories, from countries all over the world," he says. "So you get this cool mix of what does the world think it means to be a doodle of a pigeon, or a doodle of a piece of pizza." The autoencoder riffed on those drawings, creating its own original designs.

"What's great with generative AI is that it will churn out a bunch of different options so you can choose what might be the best version of a puppy or pizza slice for a T-shirt, or which hipster name is the most random but still real-sounding," says McBride. "So there was still an element of human selection and curation involved."

The fashion industry already relies on artificial intelligence to fine-tune various parts of clothes-making, from managing inventory to predicting trends to offering recommendations to customers. "Virtual stylists" help people find their ideal size when shopping online, and data-driven recommendation engines help surface things that fit into someone's personal style. Brands big and small are searching for ways to incorporate machine prowess into the process. Just last week, Amazon introduced StyleSnap, a tool that uses computer vision to find items of clothing similar to the styles in a photograph-the latest push to get people buying clothes on Amazon.

But AI also offers new opportunities for designers who are looking not just to forecast the trends, but to create original designs. Glitch, a company created by a pair of MIT graduates, sells dresses designed by deep-learning software. And last year, just in time for New York Fashion Week, artist Robbie Barrat designed an entire collection for the fashion house Balenciaga using a neural net. The program scraped images from Balenciaga's lookbooks, catalogs, and runway shows, then remixed them to create original styles. The resulting images are strange; the models' faces, in particular, smear into each other in the AI-generated photos. But the designs themselves are cool and push the boundaries of fashion in interesting ways.

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AI's Latest Job? Designing Cool T-Shirts

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The T-shirts sold by Cross & Freckle, a New York-based fashion upstart, don't look revolutionary at first glance. They come in black or white, they're cut for a unisex fit, and they sell for $25. Each of them has a little design embroidered into the cotton that references staples of New York City life: pigeons, dollar pizza slices, subway rats.

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Analysis of the possible implementation of AI in fashion design, rising issues and ethical concerns  

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Analysis of the possible implementation of AI in fashion design, rising issues and ethical concerns  

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Robbie Barat’s creative experiment had proved the  AI to be able to see fashion from a completely new perspective through  creating new shapes, combinations and  patterns that human mind  couldn’t imagine before.Since then Robbie  became a well known media artist and did collaborations with both Burberry and Acne studios.

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This post was originally published by Julia Krantz on Magic Fabric, a blog about virtual fashion and 3D technologies.
Will designers be replaced by algorithms in the future of fashion?

The thought of a fully automized society where robots and AI take over simple chores is not a futuristic utopia. It is, in fact, becoming more of a reality. But can machines also do more complex work that requires both imagination and artistic thinking?

Robbie Barrat, artist, and AI researcher, plays with the idea in his project, where he trains a neural network with image data from five different fashion shows from the luxury fashion house Balenciaga. The result is videos generating new models with outfits based on the training data. The garments, shapes, and textures might not be directly translatable into new pieces. Yet it shows on Artificial Intelligence's ability to create combinations, shapes, and textures a human eye might never have come up with.

To date, Robbie does not seem to have gotten himself recruited by the ancient fashion house. However, he clearly offers radical perspectives on how artists and designers might be able to make use of AI as a tool in their daily work to innovate their creative work process.

The project in itself evokes curiosity around how similar approaches could shake the fashion industry to its core. Would we accept paying large numbers for designer products completely generated from datasets? Or will the touch of a human become a stamp of quality in the near future?

Follow Robbie's work process on

Also check out Julia's post on Magic Fabric, Machine Learning - the future of Design?

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Can an AI Do Balenciaga Better Than Balenciaga? - The Fashion Robot

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This post was originally published by Julia Krantz on Magic Fabric , a blog about virtual fashion and 3D technologies. The thought of a fully automized society where robots and AI take over simple chores is not a futuristic utopia. It is, in fact, becoming more of a reality.

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Creative AI is being used to develop creative fashion solutions and experiences

New creative AI courses explore its uses in the fashion industry while challenging the perception of fashion design and showcasing

Use of creative AI include computer-generated artwork which sold at Christie's for US$432,500 in 2018

Artificial intelligence (AI) in fashion is no longer a secret and has widely been used to mostly help businesses to streamline processes and increase sales. But the skillsets of fashion designers and computer scientists are miles apart, so it's not until recently that the creative applications of AI in this industry have been explored.

"Initial uses of artificial intelligence have focused on quantifiable business needs, which has allowed for start-ups to offer a service to brands," Matthew Drinkwater, head of the fashion innovation agency (FIA) at London College of Fashion (LCF), told Forbes. "Creativity is much more difficult to quantify and therefore more likely to follow behind."

Creative AI and fashion

Seeing the opportunity for AI to play a bigger role in the creative process, LCF has launched an AI course aiming to develop creative fashion solutions and experiences that challenge the current approaches to fashion design.

The 8-week "AI and Fashion" course, which has already seen 20 fashion students learn Python to write code, was developed by the FIA in partnership with Dr. Pinar Yanardag, a former post-doc at MIT Media Lab and creator of collaborative collective How to Generate (Almost) Anythin g.

Despite being complete beginners in learning Python, the students were said to be able to thrive once they understood the technical capabilities of AI.

The students were asked to come up with proof-of-concept showcases and uses of AI within the fashion industry, before being shown how to gather appropriate data to train their algorithms to classify items of clothing and predict fashion trends from social media, as well as use style transfer to recognize imagery and create new designs.

By the end of the course, the students created a virtual fashion show using archive LCF show footage that was placed in different 3D environments with models wearing new 3D-generated and animated garments.

The AI models used were generative adversarial networks (GANs). GANs are said to have become the defining look of contemporary AI art and can be used to create photos of imaginary fashion models without the need to hire a model, photographer, or makeup artist.

The technology is a type of machine learning where two adversarial models are trained simultaneously - a generator (the designer) and discriminator (the design critic). The basic idea of GANs is that during training, the generator becomes better at creating images that look real, while the discriminator becomes better at detecting images that are not real. This enables the model to learn in an unsupervised manner.

Computer vision algorithms were used to detect skeletal movement from archive video footage, which then turned into a 3D pose simulation that allowed them to animate purely digital avatars in Blender based on the initial footage's movement details.

CLO software was then used to design and animate the 3D garments before style transfer allowed additional detail to the clothes to be applied. The virtual fashion show was finally realized in Unity, where the digital models were imported, and FIA's 3D Designer created immersive, animated environments.

The proof-of-concept virtual show was launched at London Fashion Week, with most brands live streaming catwalk shows behind closed doors, or releasing catwalk-style videos online, due to current ongoing social distancing measures.

New possibilities

Engagement numbers for digital shows have shown to be low in comparison to physical fashion shows, however, enthusiasm for AI-generated virtual fashion experiences continue to grow.

"It has long been evident that fashion weeks have needed to evolve to provide a much more varied and accessible experience," Drinkwater said, "one fact is undeniable, the increased blurring of our physical and digital lives is going to lead to fashion shows that are markedly different from the traditional runway of the past."

Notable uses of creative AI include the creation of computer-generated artwork, Portrait of Edmond Belamy, which was sold for US$432,500 in 2018 and was made by self-taught AI artist Robbie Barrat using a GAN model. Since then, Barrat has gone on to work on an AI-generated Balenciaga runway show and trained neural networks for fashion brand Acne Studios to generate designs for their AW20 men's collection.

The full potential for creative AI in fashion has yet to be discovered, however, with continuous restrictions and physical live events barely possible, realizing the opportunities the technology presents is something brands would do well to capitalize on.

As creative AI continues to find valuable use cases within the fashion industry, the possibility of an exciting facet of fashion emerging is very real.

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How creative artificial intelligence (AI) and fashion meet

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Creative AI is being used to develop creative fashion solutions and experiences New creative AI courses explore its uses in the fashion industry while challenging the perception of fashion design and showcasing Use of creative AI include computer-generated artwork which sold at Christie's for US$432,500 in 2018 Artificial intelligence (AI) in fashion is no longer a secret and has widely been used to mostly help businesses to streamline processes and increase sales.

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Glitch -first AI creative dedication fashion brand that makes dresses 

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Glitch -first AI creative dedication fashion brand that makes dresses 

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Glitch is a first ever fashion brand with AI as a creative director for the line of dresses.
“In the future, collaborations between algorithms and humans could become the norm.”
Machine learning and  AI are predicted to become major change drivers in Worldwide Labour market based on World Economic Forum Future of Jobs 2018

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'Glitch' is a new company that sells dresses generated by machine learning algorithms.

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Robby Barrat pushing the technology in art forward 

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Robby Barrat pushing the technology in art forward 

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A media Artist Robbie Barat taught pix2pix GAN on Balenciaga’s catalog online ,  Lookbook and runway shoots to create his own “digitally generated  perceptive on Brands designs” The artist thinks that AI technologies could possibly be used by fashion designers for a purpose of inspiration as it is not limited to humans mind perception of style, beauty and meaning of objects , designs

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"These are important visual moments": artist Robbie Barrat pushes, tests and breaks AI in his works

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With a collaboration with Acne under his belt, Robbie talks to us about his plans for the future, which include attending art school for the first time.

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Tommy Hilfiger based  AI generated product designs 

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Tommy Hilfiger based  AI generated product designs 

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AI is used to produce key insights into trend and speed up the initial design process by generating new from old , fake from real. The concept rises creative rights and other ethical concerns yet the technology is still relatively new and through its evolution more possible opportunities of it’s application in the industry  will come
IBM has teamed up with Tommy Hilfiger and The Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) Infor Design and Tech Lab on a project called Reimagine Retail to create the look of AI generated Tommy collection. This aims to demonstrate the opportunities of integrating AI in to fashion design

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Young fashion shoppers today are demanding personalization more than ever. According to an IBM study, 52% of female Generation Z would like to see tools that allow them to customize products for themselves.

This coincides with an ever-increasing expectation for speed in delivery of product. While several fast fashion retailers can get product to shelves in weeks, the majority of clothing items take anywhere from six to 12 months of development.

Technology is impacting throughout the supply chain to shift this forward, including in the creative process itself. Artificial intelligence (AI) for instance - incorporating computer vision, natural language understanding and deep learning - is being used to produce key insights on trends to both expedite the initial design process and better predict demand for hyperlocalized products.

IBM has teamed up with Tommy Hilfiger and The Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) Infor Design and Tech Lab on a project called Reimagine Retail to demonstrate this. The aim is to show how AI capabilities can give retailers an edge in terms of speed, and equip the next generation of retail leaders with new skills using AI in design, according to Steve Laughlin, general manager of IBM Global Consumer Industries.

To do so, FIT students were given access to IBM Research's AI capabilities including computer vision, natural language understanding, and deep learning techniques specifically trained with fashion data.

Those tools were applied to 15,000 of Tommy Hilfiger's product images, some 600,000 publicly available runway images and nearly 100,000 patterns from fabric sites. They then brought about key silhouettes, colors, and novel prints and patterns that could be used as informed inspiration to the students' designs.

"The machine learning analysis gave us insights about the Tommy Hilfiger colors, silhouettes and prints that we couldn't begin to consume or understand with the human mind. This enabled the FIT Fashion Design students to take their inspiration from Americana or popular fashion trends and marry that with the 'DNA', if you will, of the Tommy Hilfiger brand across those dimensions to create wholly new design concepts," explains Michael Ferraro, executive director of FIT's Infor Design and Tech Lab.

"So, a key impact [of the project was] new inspiration. Another important impact for the consumer is opportunities to customize and personalize the clothing, without losing the style of what they love about Tommy Hilfiger," he adds. The cognitive print generator tools and personality insights analysis provided some cool opportunities to give consumers that self-expression. In addition to exploring how AI might impact decision making in fashion design, we also explored how tools such as social media listening and voice recognition can create a more personalized shopping experience built around an interactive 'smart' supply chain strategy that optimizes waste and minimizes environmental impact."

The resulting 3D digital designs were presented to Tommy Hilfiger and IBM executives, who chose a plaid tech jacket by FIT senior Grace McCarty. When designing her look, McCarty said she drew inspiration from the AI produced insights on Tommy's brands' style and silhouettes, as well as popular and trending colors, and AI generated novel patterns.

The design also incorporated a special thread embedded in a removable, futuristic plaid panel with IBM's Watson's Tone Analyzer, which responds in near real-time to the sentiment in a customer's social media accounts.

"As a brand, we are always pushing the boundaries of what's possible through innovation and disruption. These young designers truly embody this spirit by showcasing the successful integration of fashion, technology and science," wrote Tommy Hilfiger's chief brand officer, Avery Baker, in a blogpost for IBM.

One of the big conversations around the use of AI in design, is whether it spells the death of creativity. If AI is used to shape exactly what new collections look like, is there even need for a designer in the first place? Both Ferraro and Laughlin believe this project demonstrates how it can be used as a means of augmenting human processes, rather than replacing them.

"AI can assist design teams by enhancing and reducing overall lead times, and expand their creative discovery by analyzing and remembering insights from thousands of images and videos using computer vision. These designers can also more easily find how they can integrate trending colors, key patterns, and styles," Laughlin explains. It's about reducing a time-consuming, resource intensive, manual process - or blowing up that research element by providing access to much wider sources than ever before, he commented.

"It is the critical difference between systems that enhance and scale human expertise, rather than those that attempt to replicate all of human intelligence. The AI inspired us and breathed new life into the design process," Ferraro adds.

IBM previously worked with Australian designer Jason Grech on the Cognitive Couture collection for Melbourne Fashion Week. This similarly analyzed thousands of runway fashion images as well as social media content to help inform the design process in a data-driven manner.

Laughlin emphasizes that making trend prediction more accessible and getting products to market faster means fewer lost sales. "For consumers, when a desired item is not immediately available in store on online, the sale will not occur," he explains.

"[Fashion companies'] slow-moving process hampers a brand's ability to be in sync with today's rapidly evolving consumers' expectations, product trends, and external market forces... In the future of fashion with AI, designers could get insights from internal and external data sources so they can make their designs more informed and relevant. It also may give them the ability to design elements that will customize and personalize looks for certain markets or consumers."

Samples of three of the six designs from FIT will be showcased at NRF's Big Show in New York this week.

... Read More

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Artificial Intelligence Empowers Designers In IBM, Tommy Hilfiger And FIT Collaboration

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Young fashion shoppers today are demanding personalization more than ever. According to an IBM study, 52% of female Generation Z would like to see tools that allow them to customize products for themselves. This coincides with an ever-increasing expectation for speed in delivery of product.

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From surrealist dance animations to personal photo series, and AI creations, we unveil the commissions created by the finalists of the Gap x Dazed New Gen Gap initiative

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Artificial intelligence has been powering tech solutions across sectors and the jewellery industry may be staring at a similar disruption. While rapid headway has been made in the production processes of the industry, jewellery designing largely remains conventional, arduous and time-consuming.

A team of researchers from Microsoft is all set to change that. In an attempt to redefine traditional jewellery-designing practices, they have used machine learning to develop a unique system.

Set In Stone
Although research into AI's role in designing steel and brass jewellery has been explored in the past, traditional stone jewellery is missing from this narrative.

This type of handcrafted jewellery - one of the most sought-after styles today - is created by rearranging precious and semi-precious stones in varied patterns. However, this process - although imaginative and interesting - is slow and cumbersome.

Leveraging jewellery design principles, the researchers at Microsoft used machine learning for space optimisation to reduce the time required to generate designs.

Decoding AI In Jewellery Designing
To understand the basic principle, imagine a simple two-dimensional polygonal fence inside which you need to place different geometrical shapes of various sizes. There can be many permutations of how these shapes can be arranged. And in this regard, numerous research projects have explored how this can be achieved by placing non-overlapping geometric shapes in a pattern.

However, most of the outputs lacked aesthetic appeal since the optimisation of these methods were based on the density of packing alone, and not on the visual design. The team from Microsoft claims to have plugged this gap with a two-pronged approach:

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Generation: The problem was modelled as a packing problem. Here, the jewellery shape is treated as the container and stone shapes as objects. Using 105 kinds of stones, each in seven different shapes and 20 distinct sizes, the stones or objects were placed inside the jewellery shape or the container one by one.

During this exercise, the team used dynamic programming to ensure that a potential negative empty space does not get created. The outcomes were then ranked based on rules around size, shape and coordinates of current positions. The rules were optimised to maximise a preordained set of jewellery design principles, which combined harmony, proportion, unity and balance.

For instance, stones whose sizes were closer to the average size of stones already placed in the jewellery shape/container were ranked higher. Another metric for a higher rank was orientation. If the stone was radially outward or inward relative to the stone placed on the opposite end, it was ranked higher. At the end of this exercise, the stone ranked highest was chosen for the design.

See Also

Pruning: In this model, designs with a low visual appeal were essentially 'pruned'. The input for this was borrowed from a dataset of 1,200 designs that were developed using AI, based on the annotation and preferences of three judges. Gradient Boosted Decision Trees were then trained using this dataset.

The resulting designs looked something like this: each stone was outlined with silver and filled with textures of real gems. Unappealing designs - disproportionate placements and nonsymmetrical orientations - were then filtered out.

To evaluate the quality of these designs, the team used a random sample set of 100 AI-generated designs, each of which were judged by 15 annotators to account for different ideas of beauty. The results were highly promising.

Nearly 53% of the designs were appreciated by annotators, and post pruning, 60% were liked by users. Thus, optimisation methods paired with machine learning techniques can play a critical role in generating jewellery designs at scale. Moreover, the scope of this technology is immense as it can be further modulated to include new design principles and can also be extended to other forms of jewellery.

In fact, the team of Microsoft researchers helped artisans from Jaipur produce attractive and production-ready designs using this technology. This enabled them to introduce more designs to the marketplace and direct their efforts towards boosting sales volumes.

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Anu is a writer who stews in existential angst and actively seeks what's broken. Lover of avant-garde films and BoJack Horseman fan theories, she has previously worked for Economic Times. Contact: [email protected]

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How Microsoft is redefining traditional jewellery-designing practices with AI

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Artificial intelligence has been powering tech solutions across sectors and the jewellery industry may be staring at a similar disruption. While rapid headway has been made in the production processes of the industry, jewellery designing largely remains conventional, arduous and time-consuming. A team of researchers from Microsoft is all set to change that.

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First AI designed jewellery made in 2017

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First AI designed jewellery made in 2017

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Coming at the price of 500$

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Made by AI - The Original Series Collection

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The world's first company that generated AI designed necklaces.
2017-2020
ORIGINAL SERIES

Now considered as a collectable.

Drop

The drop was the very first output from the AI model. Therefore it had its given place in the first collection of AI designed necklaces.

Heart

Our interpretation was that this heart-shaped necklace seems to be a mix of hearts with modern contemporary style.

Eight

This generated design resembles most a minimalistic necklace. Asymmetric, yet beautiful.

Bell

Has a design with remarkable details and yet very simplistic in its shape.

COLUMN

The founders interpretation was that the column is a good example of the AI model trying to learn simple shapes and forms.

PRESS COVERAGE

AUTHENTICATE OWNERSHIP

© Made by AI. All rights reserved.

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Made by AI - The Original Series Collection

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The world's first company that generated AI designed necklaces. 2017-2020 Now considered as a collectable. The drop was the very first output from the AI model. Therefore it had its given place in the first collection of AI designed necklaces. Our interpretation was that this heart-shaped necklace seems to be a mix of hearts with modern contemporary style.

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StyleGAN pix2pix - what is it and how can it be applied in fashion ?

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StyleGAN pix2pix - what is it and how can it be applied in fashion ?

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Pix2Pix technology is a perfect example of how GAN could be a promising tool for the creative tasks involving image-to-image translation tasks. It works great at the large scale fashion and accessory production when the company needs to develop-  more product choice and options based on the database of its previous  product. It can also detect and analyse patterns in the brands sales data to identify  the most successful designs and shapes and generate similar new designs. On top of it the technology allows us to identify possible upcoming fashion trends through analysis of the previous fashion collection photographs and then generating the visual representation of a possible future evolution of the current fashion offer.

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This tutorial will guide you on how to use the pix2pix software for learning image transformation functions between parallel datasets of corresponding image pairs.

What does pix2pix do?

pix2pix is shorthand for an implementation of a generic image-to-image translation using conditional adversarial networks, originally introduced by Phillip Isola et al. Given a training set which contains pairs of related images ("A" and "B"), a pix2pix model learns how to convert an image of type "A" into an image of type "B", or vice-versa. For example, suppose we have pairs of images, where A is a black & white image and B is an RGB-color version of A, e.g. the following:

A pix2pix network could be trained on a training set of such corresponding pairs to learn how to make full-color from black & white images. Once a pix2pix network has been trained on such a dataset, it could then be used to color arbitrary black & white images. For example, below, we apply the learned colorization model on a black & white image from our test set, and generate a colored version of it. For comparison, we show the actual color image that it came with, to see how well the network is able to reconstruct the original color image (called the "target").

output from colorizing black & white (made with colorize-it)

As we see above, the output is not identical to the input, but the network does a fairly decent job. We should expect that it will be able to color new, previously unseen black & white images to around the same accuracy.

Generalizing a bit

Many important image processing tasks can be framed as image to image translation tasks of this sort. Deblurring or denoising images can be framed in this way, and indeed there had been a great deal of past research in learning various specific image-to-image translation tasks like those and others. The nice thing about pix2pix is that it is generic; it does not require pre-defining the relationship between the two types of images. It makes no assumptions about the relationship and instead learns the objective during training, by comparing the defined inputs and outputs during training, and inferring the objective. This makes pix2pix highly flexible and adaptable to a wide variety of situations, including ones where it is not easy to verbally or explicitly define the task we want to model.

We get a good sense of this by considering a more complicated example, that of the CMP facades dataset which pix2pix has a download link for. Let's look at a small sample of images from the facades dataset.

We have on one side photographs of building facades, and on the other side, their corresponding label maps which have been hand-labeled by human beings. The label maps are color-coded according to the object it's representing, i.e. walls, windows, and doors. We can train pix2pix to generate the facade pictures from the label maps. If we do that, we can then attempt to generate an output from a test input, and compare the output to the original target image in the test dataset.

The output has numerous features that are different from the target, and has a somewhat different color, and is especially guessing in the regions where the labels are sparse. But it gets most of the main architectural features in the right place. This leads us to believe that we can mock up whole new label maps and create realistic looking facades from them! This could be very useful for an architect; they can sketch a design for a building and then quickly prototype textures for it (perhaps choosing from several dozen since they are so easy to produce).

Of course, we could have trained the network in the other direction as well; train it to generate the label maps from the real images. This can be very useful as well; suppose you are in charge of a startup which is generating special types of label maps from satellite images. This provides a way to do it quickly and cheaply.

Another important quality of pix2pix is that it requires a relatively small number of examples - for a low-complexity task, perhaps only 100-200 samples, and usually less than 1000, in contrast to networks which often requires tens or even hundreds of thousands of samples. The downside is that the model loses some generality, perhaps overfitting to the training samples, and thus can feel a bit repetitive or patchy. Still, those practical advantages make it extremely easy to deploy for a wide variety of images, enabling rapid experimentation. Since we aren't burdened with having to collect tens of thousands of examples, we may be able to create our own datasets with relatively little overhead.

Getting creative with it

The beauty about a trained pix2pix network is that it will generate an output from any arbitrary input. So far, we've looked at examples for which we already knew the correct output (the target), so that we could visually compare them. But the network will take in just about anything once it's trained, giving us some space to be creative. Let's look at some examples.

Sketches to objects

The original pix2pix software came with a number of "sketch to object" datasets. These were usually a number of images of some kind of object (say shoes) along with its edge map (the "sketch") which can be cheaply extracted from the image using standard image-processing techniques (like Canny edge detection in OpenCV). By training a pix2pix network to convert the sketch into the image, we are then able to use the model to convert a new unseen sketch into an image of the object type.

Here are some samples of sketches being turned into shoes.

As well as sketches being turned into handbags.

Sketch2Cat

Christopher Hesse made an excellent online demo demonstrating the "sketch to something" technique by training a pix2pix model to generate images of cats from their edge maps.

Additionally, he wrote a very good description of what pix2pix does, as well as the tensorflow implementation of pix2pix that the practical part of this guide will use later.

Invisible Cities

One collaborative work (of which the writer of this guide was involved in) was a project called "Invisible Cities", made during an ml4a workshop at OpenDot Lab in Milan, Italy. The project was completed in the same week that the original paper and repository was released, demonstrating how quickly one can create an applied work from it.

In Invisible Cities, a collection of map tiles and their corrsponding satellite images from multiple cities were downloaded from the MapBox API. A pix2pix model was trained to convert the map tiles into the satellite images.

Below is an example pair from one dataset of maps from Venice, Italy.

After training the Venice model, we take a map tile from a different city, Milan, Italy, and run it through the Venice pix2pix generator.

We can also make fake inputs entirely by just drawing them by hand, like the following:

More examples can be found in the gallery of the main project page.

Neural City

In Neural City, Jaspaer van Loenen trained pix2pix on Google streetview images to convert depth maps into street view photos.

First try at generating streetview-like cityscapes #deeplearning #pix2pix pic.twitter.com/SP3WiAHL0M
- Jasper van Loenen (@JaspervanLoenen) March 14, 2017

pic.twitter.com/1bLslNgm2x- Jasper van Loenen (@JaspervanLoenen) April 5, 2017

FaceTracker -> Face

Another clever dataset to work with are images of faces matched to their detected facetracker landmarks. By training pix2pix to convert the facetracker representation to the original images of faces, you can generate faces from an arbitrary set of landmarks. See the following by Mario Klingemann who trained pix2pix to generate face sketches trained on sketches found in the dataset from the British Library.

Another experiment from Mario was training the generator on YouTube videos of Francoise Hardy, then tracking the face of KellyAnne Conway while she explained "alternative facts," and generating images of Francoise Hardy from those found landmarks, effectivly making Francoise Hardy pantomime the facial gestures of KellyAnne Conway.

Riffing on this technique, I made a webcam-enabled pix2pix trained on pictures of Donald Trump's face giving a speech. The real-time application was run live for a workshop.

Person-to-person pix2pix

Brannon Dorsey trained pix2pix on image pairs of Ray Kurzweil giving a talk and himself mimicking Kurzweil's gestures. The result let him create generative versions of himself in the pose of Ray Kurzweil on stage.

Full person-to-person image translation with machine learning! Applying #pix2pix to video @branger_briz @phillip_isola @genekogan @kaihuchen pic.twitter.com/oFrzj1qcqt
- Brannon Dorsey (@brannondorsey) December 6, 2016

Live drawing interfaces

In addition to the "sketch2cat" interface mentioned above, other works have made use of pix2pix's capacity to generate in real-time.

Bertrand Gondouin trained pix2pix to turn sketches of pokemon into actual pokemons in a live drawing interface.

Sketches done using a graphics tablet, colored by a a real-time neural network trained unsupervised on #Pokemon pictures (x2) #pix2pix, #AI pic.twitter.com/MIW8HfO8KU
- Bertrand Gondouin (@bgondouin) January 9, 2017

As did Memo Akten, training a network to convert Canny edge detections from a webcam to generate images trained from a dataset containing the collections of 150 museums. Memo also released his code for running the webcam demo.

As a follow-up to Invisible Cities, I made a drawing interface with p5.js and a node-based server-client setup (much like sketch2cat) and released the code as well.

The following is a tutorial for how to use the tensorflow version of pix2pix. If you wish to, you can also use the original torch-based version or a newer pytorch version which also contains a CycleGAN implementation in it as well. Although these instructions are for the tensorflow version, they should be fairly relevant to the others with just minor modifications in syntax. You should be able to use any of the versions and get similar results.

In using pix2pix, there are two modes. The first is training a model from a dataset of known samples, and the second is testing the model by generating new transformations from previously unseen samples.

Training pix2pix means creating, learning the parameters for, and saving the neural network which will convert an image of type X into an image of type Y. In most of the examples that we talked about, we assumed Y to be some "real" image of dense content and X to be a symbolic representation of it. An example of this would be converting images of lines into satellite photographs. This is useful because it allows us to generate sophisticated and detailed imagery from quick and minimal representations. The reverse is possible as well; to train a network to convert the real imagery into its corresponding symbolic form. This can be useful for many practical tasks; for example automatically finding and labeling roads and infrastructure in satellite images.

Once a model has been generated, we use testing mode to output new samples. For example, if we trained X->Y where X is a symbolic form and Y is the real form, then we make generative Y images from previously unseen X symbolic images.

Installation

In order to run the software on your machine, you need to have an NVIDIA GPU which is supported by CUDA. Here is a list of supported devices. At least 2GB of VRAM are recommended, although realistically, with less than say 4GB, you may have to produce smaller-sized samples. If you have an older laptop, consider using a cloud-based platform instead (todo: make a guide about cloud platforms).

Once you have successfully run the installer for CUDA, you can find it on your system in the following locations:

Mac/Linux: /usr/local/cuda/

Windows: C:\Program Files\NVIDIA GPU Computing Toolkit\CUDA\v8.0

In order for your system to find CUDA, it has to be located in your PATH variables, and in LD_LIBRARY_PATH for Mac/Linux. The installer should do this automatically.

cuDNN is an add-on for CUDA which specifically implements operations for deep neural nets. It is not required to run Tensorflow but is highly recommended, as it makes many of the programs much more resource-efficient, and is probably required for pix2pix.

You have to register first with NVIDIA (easy) to get access to the download. You should download the latest version for your platform unless you have an older version of CUDA. At time of this writing, cuDNN 5.1 works with CUDA 8.0+, although cuDNN 6.0+ should work as well.

Once you've download cuDNN, you will see it contains several files in folders called "include", "lib" or "lib64", and "bin" (if on windows). Copy these files into those same folders inside of where you have CUDA installed (see step 1)

Follow tensorflow's instructions for installation for your system. In most cases this can be done with pip.

Clone or download the above library. It is possible to do all of this with the original torch-based pix2pix (in which case you have to install torch instead of tensorflow for step 3. These instructions will assume the tensorflow version.

Training pix2pix

First we need to prepare our dataset. This means creating a folder of images, each of which contain an X/Y pair. The X and Y image each occupy half of the full image in the set. Thus they are the same size. It does not matter which order they are placed into, as you will define the direction in the training command (just remember which way because you need to be consistent).

Additionally, by default the images are assumed to be square (if they are not, they will be squashed into square input and output pairs). It is possible to use rectangular images by setting the aspect_ratio argument (see the optional arguments below for more info).

Then we need to open up a terminal or command prompt (possibly in administrator mode or using sudo if on linux/mac), navigate (cd) to the directory which contains pix2pix-tensorflow, and run the following command:
python pix2pix.py --mode train --input_dir /Users/Gene/myImages/ --output_dir /Users/Gene/myModel --which_direction AtoB --max_epochs 200
replacing the arguments for your own task. An explanation of the arguments:

--mode : this must be "train" for training mode. In testing mode, we will use "test" instead.

--input_dir : directory from which to get the training images

--output_dir : directory to save the model (aka checkpoint)

--which_direction : AtoB means train the model such that the left half of your training images is the input and the right half is the output (generated). BtoA is the reverse.

--max_epochs : number of epochs (iterations) to train, i.e. how many times to each image in your training set is passed through the network in training. In practice, more is usually better, but pix2pix may stop learning after a small number of epochs, in which case it takes longer than you need. It is also sometimes possible to train it too much, as if to overcook it, and get distorted generations. The loss function does not necessarily correspond well to quality of images generated (although there is recent research which does create a better equivalency between them).

Note also that the order in which parameters are written in the command does not actually matter. Additionally, there are optional parameters which may be useful:

--checkpoint : a previous checkpoint to start from; it must be specified as the path which contains that model (so it is equivalent to -output_dir). Initially you won't have one but if your training is ever interrupted prematurely, or you wish to train for longer, you can initialize from a previous checkpoint instead of starting from scratch. This can be useful for running for a while and checking to see quality, and then resuming training for longer if you are unsatisfied.

--aspect_ratio : this is 1 by default (square), but can be used if your images have a different aspect ratio. If for example your images are 450x300 (width is 450), then you can use an aspect_ratio 1.5.

--output_filetype : png or jpg

There are more advanced options, which you can see in the arguments list in pix2pix.py. The adventurous may wish to experiment with these as well.

Unfortunately, pix2pix-tensorflow does not currently allow you to change the actual size of the produced samples and is hardcoded to have a height of 256px. Simply changing it in pix2pix.py will result in a shape mismatch. If you wish to generate bigger samples, you can do so using the original torch-based pix2pix which does have it as a command line parameter, or more adventurously adapt the tensorflow code to arbitrarily sized samples. This will require changing the architecture of the network slightly, perhaps as a function of a -sample_height parameter, which is a good exercise left to the intrepid artist.

In practice, trying to generate larger samples, say 512px does not always lead to improved results, and may instead look not much better than an upsampled version of the 256px versions, at the cost of requiring significantly more system resources/memory and taking longer to finish training. This will definitely be true if your original images are smaller than the desired size because subpixel details are not available in the training data, but even if your data is sized sufficiently, it may still occur. Worth trying out, but your results may vary.

Once you run the command, it will begin training, updating the progress periodically and will consume most or all of your system's resources so it's often worth running overnight.

Testing or generating images

The second operation of pix2pix is generating new samples (called "test" mode). If you trained AtoB for example, it means providing new images of A and getting out hallucinated versions of it in B style.

In pix2pix, testing mode is still setup to take image pairs like in training mode, where there is an X and a Y. This is because a useful thing to do is to hold out a test or validation set of images from training, then generate from those so you can compare the constructed Y to the known Y, as a way to visually evaluate the data. pix2pix helpfully creates an HTML page with a row for each sample containing the input, the output (constructed Y) and the target (known/original Y). Several of the downloadable datasets (e.g. facades) are packaged this way. In our case, since we may not have the corresponding Y (after all, that's the whole point!) a quick workaround for this problem is to simply take each X, and convert into an image twice the width where one half is the image to use as the input (X) and the other is some blank decoy image. Make sure you are consistent with how it was trained; if you trained -which_direction AtoB, the blank image is on the right, and BtoA it is on the left. If the generated html page shows the decoy as the "input" and the output is the nondescript "Rothko-like" image, then you accidentally put them in the wrong order.

Once your testing data has been prepared, run the following command (again from the root folder of pix2pix-tensorflow):
python pix2pix.py --mode test --input_dir /Users/Gene/myImages/ --output_dir /Users/Gene/myGeneratedImages --checkpoint /Users/Gene/myModel
An explanation of the arguments:

--mode : this must be "test" for testing mode.

--input_dir : directory from which to get the images to generate

--output_dir : directory to save the generated images and index page

--checkpoint : directory which contains the trained model to use. In most cases, this should simply be the same as the -output_dir argument in the original training command.

todo: example images through training and testing process

todo: make a CycleGAN guide

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This tutorial will guide you on how to use the pix2pix software for learning image transformation functions between parallel datasets of corresponding image pairs. pix2pix is shorthand for an implementation of a generic image-to-image translation using conditional adversarial networks, originally introduced by Phillip Isola et al.

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In the past 6 years AI technologies became a big trend among contemporary media artists. With many creative possibilities, AI had been utilised in ways such as creating new art from old (Robbie Barat) , fake human faces, new Bible texts (Deus EX Machina by Helena Nikonole) and even learning birds language (Birds Language by Helena Nikonole). Simultaneously AI  has been introduced into fashion industry and while it is widely used in analytics, trend prediction , virtual styling and product management only a few  young entrepreneurs proposed  integrating AI  into a creative side of the industry-design.

Based on multiple industry reports- in the next 5-7 years  AI is predicted to become  one of largely implemented  technologies in fashion  business, however on top of that it is predicted to surpass the level of a large fashion  trend among customers as many  well known brands  such as Burberry and Acne Studios  have already started to integrate AI generated designs into their  collections.

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In this app customers can choose from a large variety of products to buy and style on a digital model, then they can make a photo shoot of the digital model in the real life (camera output ) background and compete for the best style. Winer received a digital fashion item as a reward.

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STYLE... SNAP... SHARE... WIN!

Fashion AR brings fashion styling to life in a way you've never seen before. Dress and style your model, pose her in the real world, take photos and share your favourites to win prizes.

Everyone's going to be talking about Fashion AR, so strike a pose and catwalk your style.

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Fashion AR brings fashion styling to life in a way you've never seen before. Dress and style your model, pose her in the real world, take photos and share your favourites to win prizes. Everyone's going to be talking about Fashion AR, so strike a pose and catwalk your style.

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The AR and VR technology in fashion  had been developing quite fast since the birth of the Snapchat and later on Instagram face filters . However it was the pandemic of  2020 and social distancing rules that really rose  the customers demand and interest in the  AR shopping,trying out and exploring the product through a mixed reality experience. That quick customer interest shift had caused many brands to react and try to fast-adapt to the increased  consumer demand  for digital. Many have created brand themed face filter for social media and virtual product try out option such as Scry lab digital shoe model.
AR and VR are  “particularly relevant for Gen Z, who prioritise authenticity, interactivity and engagement”,
In the future, Arguelles says that VR and AR assets can work together — many virtual stores include AR — and can be repurposed as the tech evolves.
In future the new revenue opportunities might rise  for digital-only products.
“In three to five years, virtual goods will represent an entirely new revenue opportunity for brands and creators.”

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Augmented reality is driving sales on top of engagement for fashion and beauty brands that are investing in the technology, either through social media platforms or on their sites.

On e-commerce sites, viewing 3D models in AR increases conversion by up to 250 per cent.

While AR skills are still nascent, tech platforms are investing in tools to make it more accessible.

SAN FRANCISCO- Last week, Tel Aviv-based influencer marketing agency Leaders Group introduced the first marketplace for people who design and build augmented reality filters. Called Creators AR, it operates like an Etsy-style marketplace: creators list their price and profile, and brands can commission them to design custom assets.

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Fashion and beauty brands are taking AR more seriously

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With the backing of big tech, augmented reality is becoming table stakes for fashion and beauty brands.

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Get access to vogue business !1!

https://www.voguebusiness.com/technology/ai-ar-and-vr-shaping-fashions-future-peter-diamandis?itm_source=manual_article_recommendation

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X Prize founder Peter Diamandis outlines the key technologies expected to change fashion and shopping in the next few years.

Key takeaways:

Entrepreneur and investor Peter Diamandis predicts that the future of shopping will be "always on", thanks to ubiquitous augmented reality.

Artificial intelligence is in position to streamline and...

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A top Silicon Valley futurist on how AI, AR and VR will shape fashion's future

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X Prize founder Peter Diamandis outlines the key technologies expected to change fashion and shopping in the next few years. Key takeaways: Entrepreneur and investor Peter Diamandis predicts that the future of shopping will be "always on", thanks to ubiquitous augmented reality. Artificial intelligence is in position to streamline and...

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Amid this year's dramatic shift towards online shopping, virtual stores - reflecting a new, more accessible interpretation of virtual reality - have emerged as a novel approach to online shopping. And this time around, headsets are not included.

A range of brands including Charlotte Tilbury, Clarins, Tommy Hilfiger, Farfetch, Intermix and American Eagle are all testing some form of virtual store technology, many tied to the holiday shopping season. Part virtual reality, part embellished website, virtual stores are defined by immersive, interactive elements that both entertain customers and let them make a purchase. Unlike in-store VR stations from years past, these are accessible via desktop or mobile, and the elements are not static, meaning they can be updated just like a traditional site.

Carolina Herrera's new website supplements product listings with show videos, augmented reality try-on and product customisation. Gucci and Intermix are using one-on-one texting and video shopping appointments with store associates. Some virtual stores go a step further, enabling customers to navigate a 3D digital space as if they were browsing via "street view" in Google Maps. Tommy Hilfiger's virtual store has three colour-coded, themed rooms that look and sound like a store during the holidays: check out the festive music, recessed lighting and shoppable clothes hanging on racks that cast shadows on the digital carpet. But unlike a store in the mall, there's a "snow room", with snow falling and piling up on the floor. There are also no other customers.

Amid a global pandemic, virtual stores provide a holiday shopping experience that is more inviting than a grid-based website and safer than in-person shopping. Because they are accessed via computer or smartphone, rather than headset, they are a more realistic approach to VR, says Snapchat head of global product marketing Carolina Arguelles. The pandemic has given VR retail a new lease of life, adds angel investor Lisa Pan, co-founder and president of smart glasses company Photon Lens. But unlike experiments of years past that were about tentatively exploring a new technology, this time around brands are driven by the need for meaningful results. "Brands have been more deliberate in their choice of what kind of XR experience makes sense for their products," says Pan.

VR gets a rebrand

To create their virtual stores, Tommy Hilfiger and Charlotte Tilbury worked with experiential e-commerce software provider Obsess. The company reports a 400 per cent increase in inbound interest since the pandemic, and the types of conversations have changed, says founder and CEO Neha Singh. For the past four years, innovation teams approached Obsess because they wanted to experiment with VR. Now, merchandising and retail teams are asking to solve specific problems. "People are not reaching out because it's VR - they are reaching out for virtual stores," Singh says.

This October, Obsess received funding from Venture Reality Fund, WXR Fund and Jump Capital, bringing the total raised to $3.4 million. "We really like that it doesn't force you to have a headset, and it allows you to create something akin to a physical store," says Jump Capital partner Yelena Shkolnik.

Virtual reality's less-than-glowing reputation has been a roadblock in the past, Singh says, but that is less of a problem as brands see how the tech works without a headset. She often refers to virtual stores as "web-based 3D" or "web-based VR" to make a point of difference. The virtual stores also blend fantastical details with familiar elements, such as doors and cameras at human height, to make them more palatable.

This pivot might make VR more commercially viable, Arguelles says. "Realistically, how many times a day and how long do you want to be totally disconnected in a fully immersed headset? It's about thinking about the consumer's point of view. We get excited about the tech but who cares if people don't use it?"

Experiential e-commerce

The Charlotte Tilbury Beauty Wonderland is fully integrated with the brand's e-commerce website, meaning that product prices and availability are current, but that's largely where the similarities to traditional e-commerce end. A Magic Charlotte avatar guides visitors through three-dimensional themed "beauty zones", like Hollywood or Rock 'n' Roll, as they shop customisable makeup kits. Customers can watch live events, recorded tutorials or invite a friend to join via video. "I want you to feel like you are literally stepping into my world," says Tilbury, chairman and chief creative officer of Charlotte Tilbury Beauty.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, the digital experience has become a significantly more important tool for interaction between brands and consumers. This has prompted brands to fundamentally rethink their online presences beyond the purely functional. Instead of repetitively emphasising speed and convenience, they're adding in the type of surprise and delight that might characterise a holiday window display or a Saturday at the mall.

"Today, e-commerce is very functional," says Singh. "This interface was created 25 years ago by Amazon to sell books, and websites all look the same. Experiential retail has been a topic for the last several years, and that is now coming to e-commerce." The more people engage, the more they purchase. On average, customers spend almost as much time on one virtual store page as they do on all the pages in the rest of an e-commerce site combined, according to Obsess. For one client, conversion rates increased up to 50 per cent when compared to shopping the same collection via e-commerce.

As budgets pivot to e-commerce, we'll see more investment in online experiences, predicts Jump Capital's Shkolnik. "When we talk to retailers and brands, people have told us that they've gone from 15 to 85 per cent e-commerce in a couple months. Now you are rethinking your site, and e-commerce has become the core of your experience, and how do you do that successfully? If something works, you will roll it out broadly and stick with it."

Tommy Hilfiger is evaluating customer engagement through a dashboard that shows details like product clicks, how various marketing channels tie back to sales, and its ability to convert store-only shoppers into multichannel shoppers. Since relaunching its new website, Carolina Herrera's user loyalty base has increased by 50 per cent, visits per user have grown by 30 per cent and page views per visit have increased by 25 per cent. The brand plans to add new features such as a perfume search engine, a virtual makeup tester and VR content Instagram integration throughout.

Over time, these assets could be used in additional mixed reality experiences. Angel investor Lisa Pan notes that in China, where VR boomed and crashed in 2016, people are willing to give traditional VR a second chance as the hardware and software improve. This will be particularly relevant for Gen Z, who prioritise authenticity, interactivity and engagement, Shkolnik says - that's tough to make happen with two-dimensional assets. According to a survey of six US industries surveyed by the XR association, the retail sector is the most optimistic when it comes to future applications of XR technology, at 80 per cent.

In the future, Arguelles says that VR and AR assets can work together - many virtual stores include AR - and can be repurposed as the tech evolves. She also predicts new revenue opportunities for digital-only products. "AR and VR get pitted against each other a lot, but they are very related. Virtual-only merchandise will see this proliferate meaningfully within 14 months. In three to five years, virtual goods will represent an entirely new revenue opportunity for brands and creators."

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More on this topic: What an inspiring digital fashion week looks like A top Silicon Valley futurist on how AI, AR and VR will shape fashion's future Forget digital versus physical: The future is programmable

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Amid this year's dramatic shift towards online shopping, virtual stores - reflecting a new, more accessible interpretation of virtual reality - have emerged as a novel approach to online shopping. And this time around, headsets are not included.

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Farfetch store of the future offers 3d digital clothes 

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Farfetch store of the future offers 3d digital clothes 

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Auroboros designers Paula Sello and Alissa Aulbekova, who are in residence at Lee Alexander McQueen's Sarabande Foundation, debuted their first ready-to-wear collection this week, a 14-piece run inspired by sci-fi films, including Ex Machina and Avatar. The collection was released on fashion game and marketplace Drest, in addition to their website, with garments priced between £100-450.

Rather than paying to own a physical garment, customers pay for digital versions they can overlay on images of themselves. Auroboros is the first digital-only clothing brand to sell on Drest.

"Paula and Alissa have carved out a niche and push technological boundaries," says Drest fashion director-at-large Candice Fragis. "I am wowed by their ingenuity and execution for what is not only their first collection but a first for luxury fashion."

Digital-only fashion is a burgeoning category for online marketplaces, bolstered by the pandemic, which has shifted interactions to screens and limited travel. XR Couture, The Dematerialised and Dress-X have all launched in recent months as places for designers to sell and for customers to buy digital-only designs. Venture capital is still nascent: Drest, at launch, received an undisclosed amount of funding from entrepreneur Graham Edwards, while The Dematerialised is preparing for a March seed round. The concept is still new to many customers, but all see an opportunity to be the Farfetch or Net-a-Porter of digital fashion. Digital fashion marketplaces can open up additional revenue for designers and brands, says Dress-X co-founder Natalia Modenova, who is based in Los Angeles.

"Digital fashion marketplaces will disrupt the entire fashion industry," predicts Megan Kaspar, managing director and co-founder of Magnetic, an investment and incubation firm focused on businesses in the blockchain sector. In addition to generating "new visceral experiences and revenue streams", digital fashion will become more relevant as augmented reality matures, she says. While she hasn't invested yet in a fashion-specific startup, Kaspar has recently invested in other companies that sell digital assets.

"For the last two decades, this has been a huge market in the digital gaming spheres," Aulbekova says. "The customer is ready. Now we are just bridging the gap between luxury fashion and creativity and accessibility."

How it works

Customers browse digital-only marketplaces online as they would any traditional fashion marketplace. When they buy a 3D digital design - prices generally range from $15 to $200, they also submit a photo. Then, digital tailors "dress" their image and send it to them. Instead of waiting for the item in the mail, it arrives via email. Some sites, like XR Couture, which launched in September 2020 and carries digital items like iridescent trousers, take a small commission. Dress-X charges $25 to $200 depending on the complexity of the garment and sells both static versions and motion versions.

The more than 600 items on Dress-X are from both purely digital fashion houses and traditional fashion brands who have created digital versions of their designs. Thirty per cent are from in-house designers. Half of its customers are between 25 and 35. "Our customer is the luxury customer who wants to try something new - they are already wearing Celine bags in the images," says Dress-X co-founder Daria Shapovalova, adding that she doesn't think this will obviate physical clothing purchases from Gen Z and millennials, but they will add it to their mix "along with Rent the Runway and The RealReal".

While digital fashion marketplaces don't carry inventory, some brands limit item availability to increase exclusivity. The Dematerialised, which is still in closed beta, launched with only one branded €120 product that is authenticated via blockchain. Brands and individual creators can sell their own work on the marketplace, and stores are designed as an immersive virtual world. People joining via mobile can see the item in their own space via augmented reality. "It was important to have the experiential part - not just the Amazon part," says co-founder Karinna Nobbs, who is based in Ibiza. "We wanted something different and special and curated that will make brands want to join us."

XR Couture founder and creative director Subham Jain's family manufactures apparel for brands including River Island, Guess and Asos, and as brands have begun creating digital samples, he saw the opportunity to create an influencer-friendly approach to fast fashion that created less waste. "I know it better than anyone else how much waste a manufacturing unit produces," he says. When he started XR Couture, he promoted it by tagging influencers. "Everyone loved the designs and would say, 'I would love to try this - this is my address'," but once they understand the concept and post the digital content, they see an increase in comments and engagement, he says.

Dress-X's Shapovalova, who previously founded a wholesale and showroom business in Ukraine, says word of mouth on social media is a key growth driver. Ultimately, she says, digital fashion will be an entry point to luxury, like lipstick and fragrance are today.

Not all elements of digital fashion mimic the physical world. Many digital garments capitalise on the opportunity to create something that is not possible in real life; a recent sneaker created by Buffalo London and The Fabricant, for example, was $60 on Dress-X and adorned with moving flames. "Never before have you been able to wear silicon that is dripping and glowing," says Sello, of Auroboros. "It's not been viable before besides in big Hollywood productions."

What's next

Some critics say digital fashion lacks a use case outside of Instagram, but The Dematerialised's Nobbs and her co-founder Marjorie Hernandez are building a bigger value proposition. By authenticating 3D assets on a blockchain, they can be owned and used not just in static images but in video games, virtual reality and to collect and sell as digital art, which is something crypto enthusiasts have been embracing for years. The blockchain is able to certify the artist, the owner, and the edition, such as "1 out of 100", and it allows the owner to retain the good, even if The Dematerialised were to disappear, Hernandez says. "If Fortnite shuts down with all those billions of goods in the game, you don't own it," she says.

"Tokenising" digital items, known as NFT, is best for the consumer and for brand monetisation, Kaspar says. Otherwise, digital items can be copied, which diminishes their value for brands. "Primary and secondary marketplaces for NFT-based items are the future of the fashion economy," she says. "Not only will digital fashion marketplaces make money with primary sales, but for the first time, brands can participate in the secondary market for the life of a digital product."

With consumers now adapted to always-on screens, there are more opportunities to sell them digital garments for Zoom and other virtual worlds. "There are a lot of conversations of having digital twins or avatars in a game or for other occasions," Dress-X's Modenova says. "But what we all have now are accounts in social media - they are our digital twins, whether it's Instagram or LinkedIn or TikTok." Dress-X is developing an app - 75 per cent of its traffic is mobile - and working on automation, so that people don't have to wait the 24 hours to receive their altered image.

The demand for digital fashion marketplaces will rise as use-cases, such as social media AR capabilities, rise, Kaspar says. Jain and others predict a subscription-based service that works akin to Snapchat filters. "My vision is that the next time you're swiping for a filter, you would be swiping for new clothing," he says. Nobbs predicts brands will sell digital garments on their own sites, in addition to digital fashion marketplaces, and anticipates exclusivity agreements in the vein of those created with companies like Net-a-Porter or MatchesFashion.

So far, major luxury brands dabbling in selling digital fashion have done so only through in-game assets and promotions that tie in to a physical product. "I hope the industry changes from a marketing point of view to implementing," says Auroboro's Aulbekova.

Dress-X and XR Couture look and feel like traditional fashion e-commerce sites, with product grids and prices, while The Dematerialised wants to be the "digital department store of your dreams".

Shapovalova says she does not want Dress-X to be perceived as a fashion website. Instead, she thinks Dress-X is better classified as "a tech company". This might bode well: Farfetch has said the same thing.

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More on this topic: Digital fashion surges in a sales downturn Digital clothing: Redefining reality With Drest, digital clothing is one step closer to mainstream

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These platforms want to be the Farfetch of digital fashion

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Auroboros designers Paula Sello and Alissa Aulbekova, who are in residence at Lee Alexander McQueen's Sarabande Foundation, debuted their first ready-to-wear collection this week, a 14-piece run inspired by sci-fi films, including Ex Machina and Avatar. The collection was released on fashion game and marketplace Drest, in addition to their website, with garments priced between £100-450.

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Nike has been experimenting heavily with augmented reality for a few years now, and the company is continuing to work on new experiences powered by the technology.

Generating recommendation algorithms to scan your feet and find the right shoe fit for you. And you can do it all in augmented reality, using the Nike app

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Edgar Alvarez/Engadget

Nike has been experimenting heavily with augmented reality for a few years now, and the company is continuing to work on new experiences powered by the technology. The sportswear giant is now introducing Nike Fit, a feature that uses a combination of computer vision, scientific data, artificial intelligence and recommendation algorithms to scan your feet and find the right shoe fit for you. And you can do it all in augmented reality, using the Nike app on your smartphone. Nike says that, according to industry research, over 60 percent of people wear the wrong size shoes. With Nike Fit, the company is hoping to solve that problem.

The AR experience itself is fairly simple: You open up the Nike app, go to a product page and, next to where there's usually a menu that lets you pick the size of your shoes, you'll see a new option to measure your feet. From there, the camera will pop up and you'll be asked to stand next to a wall and point your smartphone at your feet, which will prompt a view that uses two AR circles to level your phone. Once the feature recognizes your feet and your physical environment, it starts scanning your feet and then tells you your ideal shoe size for Nike footwear. The entire process takes less than a minute.

For example, you can get a "You are a 10.5" in this Air Max sneaker, giving you more information about why, like "80 percent of people with similar feet to you purchased this size" or "This shoe runs slightly small." Nike Fit will measure your feet virtually down to the millimeter size, and it can tell you if your right foot is larger than your left one, or vice versa. The company says that, based on early testing, it is quite confident on the technology, so much so that it plans to make it a core feature of its Nike app -- it's not just an experiment or a marketing move.

Of course, once you've used the AR tools to measure your feet, that information will be saved in your Nike profile, which means you don't have to do it every time you're trying to buy a shoe. And if you go to a retail stores, associates will know which sizes are best for you on various models by simply scanning a QR code from the Nike app. As someone who wears different sizes in Air Max and Epic Reacts, because the latter tend to be narrower and run smaller, Nike Fit suggested my right fit was between 10 and 11 for all its products -- and that'll come in handy the next time I'm buying a pair.

Nike says this should also make it easier for parents, since they can just measure their kids' feet right at home, saving them a trip to the store and letting them easily place orders on line. And parents can use Nike Fit every few months, as their kids' feet grow in size. If you do go to a Nike store, associates there will have their own Nike Fit experience, which lets them use their smartphone instead of the traditional Brannock Device to get your exact shoe size. Once they have that and your Nike profile, they can scan any shoe box and the system will tell them what's the best size for you in any particular model.

You'll have a chance to try Nike Fit for yourself in July, when the company is expected to roll out these features to its app. At launch, it'll be available in the US only, but Nike says it plans to bring it to Europe later this summer.

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Nike uses AR to help you find the right fit for your sneakers | Engadget

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Nike has been experimenting heavily with augmented reality for a few years now, and the company is continuing to work on new experiences powered by the technology. The sportswear giant is now introducing Nike Fit, a feature that uses a combination of computer vision, scientific data, artificial intelligence and recommendation algorithms to scan your feet and find the right shoe fit for you.

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Amazon In March 2018, L'Oréal acquired augmented reality company Modiface. Beauty fans have already reaped benefits like Garnier's Virtual Shade Selector for hair-color choices. "The idea behind the acquisition was to deploy the augmented reality technology for all of our brands, in all of our countries," L'Oréal’s chief digital officer Lubomira Rochet tells Allure. It's hard to overstate just how big this move is, for L'Oréal, for Amazon, and for consumers who want more certainty from the products they buy online. virtual try on 

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Amazon In March 2018, L'Oréal acquired augmented reality company Modiface. Beauty fans have already reaped benefits like Garnier's Virtual Shade Selector for hair-color choices. "The idea behind the acquisition was to deploy the augmented reality technology for all of our brands, in all of our countries," L'Oréal’s chief digital officer Lubomira Rochet tells Allure. It's hard to overstate just how big this move is, for L'Oréal, for Amazon, and for consumers who want more certainty from the products they buy online. virtual try on 

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In our world of massive online retailers and seemingly limitless options, researchers have studied a common experience: The more choices you have, the harder it is to make a decision. That's certainly true in the beauty world, where a search for "lipstick" on Amazon pulls up over 50,000 options. Even on the first page of results, you'll be forced to decide between shades from L'Oréal Paris, Revlon, Maybelline, and Anastasia Beverly Hills. But instead of getting overwhelmed and selecting whichever red pops up first, L'Oréal wants consumers to make more informed decisions. To help, the beauty megagiant has partnered with Amazon to allow users to virtually try on lipsticks using their phone or computer cameras.

Queue up a lipstick on the Amazon app or website and you'll notice two new, exciting words under the photo: Try now.

You'll choose from Live Mode (a live video try-on using your camera) or the ability to take or upload a new photo. If you're not ready for your close-up, you can find a model with a similar skin tone. Using augmented reality technology, you'll then swipe your selected lipstick over your lips. For anyone who's ever lived the IRL version of the Twitter meme "when you order it vs. when it arrives," this functionality is a game-changer. You can sample trends like neon lipstick from the comfort of your couch. And since we're talking Amazon, you can order a lipstick on Wednesday and be wearing it out by Friday.

In March 2018, L'Oréal (full disclosure, I have worked for the company as a consultant) acquired augmented reality company Modiface. Beauty fans have already reaped benefits like Garnier's Virtual Shade Selector for hair-color choices. "The idea behind the acquisition was to deploy the augmented reality technology for all of our brands, in all of our countries," L'Oréal's chief digital officer Lubomira Rochet tells Allure. It's hard to overstate just how big this move is, for L'Oréal, for Amazon, and for consumers who want more certainty from the products they buy online.

Both companies are expecting what Rochet terms a "massive effect" in terms of sales. "We have clear analytics that show the time spent on the website is doubled on sites with the try-on experience," she says. "It triples the conversion rate."

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You Can Now Virtually Try on Lipstick Before Buying It on Amazon

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In our world of massive online retailers and seemingly limitless options, researchers have studied a common experience: The more choices you have, the harder it is to make a decision. That's certainly true in the beauty world, where a search for "lipstick" on Amazon pulls up over 50,000 options.

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AR technologies leading beauty , home design industry forward and improving customer experience  

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AR technologies leading beauty , home design industry forward and improving customer experience  

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By Tricia McKinnon

You are shopping for furniture and you just found a piece you absolutely love. Then the agonizing sets in. Will it? or won't it? Fit into your space? And even if it does fit will it look good next to that side table you bought last Christmas? That's where augmented reality shopping apps can make a difference. They let you see what a piece of merchandise looks like in your home before you buy it or if you want to buy a new pair of eyeglasses they can show you what the glasses look like on you without a trip to the mall. Use of augmented reality is still at its infancy with only 13% of people in the United States in 2021 having ever used augmented or virtual reality before to shop.

Many retailers are coming out with augmented reality apps to make it easier for you to buy the perfect item. Here are ten retailers that have augmented reality functionality in their apps. Maybe you should give one of them a try before your next trip to the mall or in the case of Amazon before your next order.

All of these apps are available to iOS and Android users with the exception of the Anthropologie and IKEA Place apps which are only available to iOS users.
1. Home Depot

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10 of the Best Augmented Reality (AR) Shopping Apps to Try Today

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Use these AR apps before your next shopping trip.

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The fashion industry is transforming with AR technology 

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The fashion industry is transforming with AR technology 

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Although I would not describe the fashion industry as early adopters of technology, it does seem that technological innovation has still managed to take hold of the $2.4 trillion industry. Promising to revolutionise the entire business of fashion, there is one technology that is on the rise in this space and that is Augmented Reality (AR).

Augmented Reality Powered Shopping

In the last few years, we have been witness to how the pull of AR has been remodelling the fashion industry's business model, especially in retail. The brands who have invested so far, have introduced blending real-time surroundings with animated design to their business, a change that is giving their customers the opportunity to interact seamlessly with the brand, in a way that was not possible before.

So it looks like AR-powered shopping could be the way forward. According to Vertebrae, although only 20 per cent of American consumers have experienced AR-powered shopping, three-quarters of customers in the US prefer augmented reality experiences over video content for shopping, gaming and entertainment. Overwhelmingly, their research also revealed, that the majority of customers would prefer to use AR technologies to help them with purchasing decisions.

Although AR is the kind of technology that will give fashion brands and retailers the opportunity to tailor make experiences for their customers, adoption of the technology has been slow. I think this is more to do with what is currently available rather than lack of interest. The truth of the matter is that the technology is still trying to find its feet, and when it does become that little bit more user-friendly (and affordable), I foresee both online and offline adoption of AR experiences increasing rapidly.

Enter The Brave

So far, there have been a few fashion brands that have dipped their toe into the world of AR. The 'early pioneers' of AR include companies like GAP Inc. who entered the AR space with Dressing Room, a Google Tango-enabled device which enabled users to use the app to customise an avatar based on their body type. The technology also gave GAP customers the opportunity to see how different pieces of clothing looked on them at different angles before deciding whether to purchase the clothing, which they could do directly from the app. The experience allowed GAP to offer its customers a seamless shopping experience while boosting their revenue, a definite win, win.

DressingRoom by Gap Inc. Image Credit: WSJ

Then there was LVMH's Sephora. They introduced Virtual Artist in partnership with ModiFace. The app, which was reportedly downloaded over 10 million times, gave their customers the opportunity to try on various makeup shades and combinations using their front-facing camera on their mobile. As one of the first AR apps to move outside of the clothing fashion space and into the beauty space, the app's success was not only revolutionary, it also helped increase the company's revenue.

Besides the big companies, there have been a few smaller companies, like Wanna Kicks and Tenth Street Hats, investing in AR. They used the AR technology so they can give their customers the opportunity to see how accessories would look before purchase. By investing in AR features, the companies conversion rates increased by one-third which emphasises the potential that AR solutions could bring to both small and larger businesses in the fashion industry.

Plug-and-Play for the Masses

Recently, NexTech AR Solutions Inc. launched a Try-It-On AR experience that could be key when it comes to Plug-and-Play for the Masses. Looking to solve a problem, they used their patent-pending web-enabled AR e-commerce platform that enables fashion brands to provide a realistic experience for their customers. In a nutshell, NexTech's AR has been designed to help consumers, purchasing above the shoulder accessories like glasses, headwear and jewellery, see what the product looks like on them.

Currently targeting small businesses that don't have the budget or know-how, NexTech CEO Evan Gappelberg said: "One of the most significant pain points that remains in online retail for a consumer is the inability to try something on before they buy it." Adding, "This often leads to frustration, the ordering of incorrectly sized items, and unnecessary returns that are costly to the retailer. NexTech's new Try-It-On AR technology eliminates the issue by enabling retailers to offer a virtual fitting room to their consumers."

One of the advantages of NexTech's AR is that it is a web-based solution that can be added with just a few lines of embedded code into an existing e-commerce website. Its simple nature means that brands do not have to worry about investing in expensive app-only solutions or developing in-house AR technology. I nstead they can use NexTech's AR for a low monthly subscription fee that gives them access to a business changing plug-and-play solution.

As more and more consumers demand a seamless shopping experience filled with technological experiences, could AR technology be the natural choice for the fashion industry? Well, with advances in the technology taking place at super speed, I do not think that we will have to wait very long to see.

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How Is Augmented Reality Transforming the Fashion Industry?

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Although I would not describe the fashion industry as early adopters of technology, it does seem that technological innovation has still managed to take hold of the $2.4 trillion industry. Promising to revolutionise the entire business of fashion, there is one technology that is on the rise in this space and that is Augmented Reality (AR).

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Sportswear label Puma has launched its first augmented reality shoe, the LQD Cell Origin Air. The sneakers are entirely covered in 2D QR codes, which unlock an array of AR experiences once scanned with a mobile phone camera, including games, filters and fun effects. Wearers first have to download the Puma LQD Cell app available on the App Store or Google Play to access the features.

"LQD CELL Origin AR is PUMA's answer to a world in which the line between reality and the virtual realm becomes increasingly blurred", said the brand in a statement, noting that the limited-edition shoes are available for purchase at Puma.com and selected retailers worldwide for 130 euro (approximately 111 pounds or 145 US dollars).

Beyond AR, this is the first in a line of shoes using Puma's new LQD Cell technology, which provides extra cushioning by means of hexagonal Profoam cells. The company claims it makes the shoes "more compact and malleable". Other products featuring the same technology will be launched in the upcoming months.
Want to stay up-to-date on the latest developments in the fashion industry? Sign up for the FashionUnited newsletter!
Pictures: courtesy of Puma

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Puma launches its first augmented reality shoe

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Sportswear label Puma has launched its first augmented reality shoe, the LQD Cell Origin Air. The sneakers are entirely covered in 2D QR codes, which unlock an array of AR experiences once scanned with a mobile phone camera, including games, fil

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AR Fashion Assist

In recent years, the use of augmented reality has proven itself as a practical feature on smartphones. In addition to its use in games such as Pokémon Go, AR was mainly established for product visualisation purposes for both the automotive industry as well as furniture manufacturers. However, we are convinced that AR features can also be successfully used in the fashion industry in order to introduce a new kind of product visualization - apart from photos and videos.

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In recent years, the use of augmented reality has proven itself as a practical feature on smartphones. In addition to its use in games such as Pokémon Go, AR was mainly established for product visualisation purposes for both the automotive industry as well as furniture manufacturers.

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Why and how  AR became fashion’s lates trend 

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Why and how  AR became fashion’s lates trend 

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According to an estimate by Digi-Capital, 3.5 billion people would be using augmented reality by 2022, which equates to “44%” of the World’s population.

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Fashion and Beauty is undeniably one of the most innovative and fast-moving industries when it comes to engaging consumers and developing innovative strategies. Now imagine introducing a powerful and compelling tool like Augmented Reality (AR) to this equation. Result? Enhanced marketing campaigns and consumer engagement leading to boosted SALES. Be it online or offline markets, time and again fashion retail tends to find early adopters in anything that is judged as " trending" or " the next big thing." According to an estimate by Digi-Capital, 3.5 billion people would be using augmented reality by 2022, which equates to "44%" of the World's population. In an interview with Vogue, Apple CEO Tim Cook stated that Augmented Reality is set to modernise shopping experiences and fashion runways. " I don't think there is any sector or industry that will be untouched by AR," Cook said.

The world of fashion has already begun to comprehend this colossal shift to AR. " Augmented Reality technology is completely changing industries. The ability to visualise fashion and beauty products in real time, demonstrates how it's possible to leverage AR to make a retail experience more engaging and interactive," explains Jordan Yim, Director at INHAABIT. This move is not just limited to the transforming processes undertaken by brands but has also been embraced by the consumers in recent years. According to an article by Forbes, Greg Jones, director of VR and AR at Google stated that insights from Google show 61% of the users say they would prefer to shop stores that offer AR. " AR is set to reconnect physical and digital retail," he said. Several retail brands have already rolled out AR features in their apps and in-store experiences. There are massive plusses for businesses adapting Augmented Reality technology. This article further discusses brand examples and how they've benefited from the use of AR.

Sephora has incorporated a "Virtual Artist" feature in its mobile application. The feature was an immediate winner generating around 45 million hits in the first eight weeks. It helps to eliminate issues that many consumers face while making online cosmetic purchases - "Is this shade right for my skin tone? Would it look good on my face?". Augmented Reality has created the convenience of a trial at home and helped to accelerate the online shopping experience.

Designer brands are not far behind and have started to showcase exclusive collections and create real-life experiences. Suzanne Harward, one of Australia's leading wedding couture brands has introduced the Suzanne Harward Virtual View mobile application that transforms bridal gown shopping into an effortless and enticing experience for brides. Employing the inventive AR technology, the app enables the customers to view Suzanne Harward's exclusive wedding couture collection on "life-size models" in the convenience of their homes, thus providing a comfortable and engaging experience. Brides can zoom into the intricate details, premium fabric and see the model in full 360 degrees, to visualise how each gown would appear in real life. This paves way for a more confident and informed decision making, which is proven to be a mutual benefit for both customers and retailers. Suzanne Harward Virtual View is available on iOS and Android.

Wanna Kicks lets its users try a pair of sneakers on their feet, with added tracking features that enable them to move around freely (which consumers usually do in physical stores). How cool is that? In an interview with TechCrunch, WannaBy CEO and ex-Googler Sergey Arkhangelskiy stated, " We believe that AR try-on can help customers to shop online and will wash away the difference between online and offline shopping."

Benefits are not just limited to online retailing. Augmented Reality also enhances the in-store experience for consumers. Global retailer Zara has implemented AR to showcase its brand-new collection at the storefront, which provides a live runway like demonstration of items. Experiences like these add a layer of emotion through the digital platform. Greg Jones, director of VR and AR at Google explained how AR is a promising prospect to strengthen "brand value" through realistic and immersive storytelling.

Social media has now become an indispensable part of most of our lives, thus reassuring several brands to engage with the social lives of the consumers. Nike has capitalised on the AR to create a "socially engaging" experience for its fans. Through their experimental 'SNKRS Stash' in Los Angeles, users were assigned the task of finding specific locations via hints provided in the app. Upon arrival, they would receive a special offer, giving them access to limited edition and exclusive shoes. AR has enabled brands to unlock the many benefits of social media engagement and innovative campaigns.

AR is an exciting new way to experience products and these brands are paving the way for digital advancement in the world of fashion. Global leaders like Zara and Nike are a great example and source of encouragement for others to formulate AR campaigns and strategies to revolutionise the way consumers shop and interact. Fashion retail is a dynamic industry and staying up to date with the latest technology is essential to moving forward. At the end of the day, fashion is all about making customers "happy and confident", right?

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Augmented Reality: The Latest Trend In The Fashion Industry

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Fashion and Beauty is undeniably one of the most innovative and fast-moving industries when it comes to engaging consumers and developing innovative strategies. Now imagine introducing a powerful and compelling tool like Augmented Reality (AR) to this equation. Result? Enhanced marketing campaigns and consumer engagement leading to boosted SALES.

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Forbes comments on the big opportunities of AR fashion 

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Forbes comments on the big opportunities of AR fashion 

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With consumers not being able to go to the store for now and try on a pair of jeans or a pair of shoes, many companies are looking at ways to bring their virtual goods for a try on to them in the comfort of their own home. Brands are also seeing an uptick in consumers using augmented reality to virtually try on makeup or even clothes.

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Virtual fashion is here to stay.
Credit: The Fabricant

Fashion week is out! At least that's what luxury brand Gucci has said after they announced they are going seasonless and will only have two shows a year.

The pandemic is changing not only consumer behavior but also changing how brands think about their roadmap. It is also bringing about new opportunities for forward-thinking brands to take a peek at the future of fashion. A future that could be a very profitable one if they understand that trends that are merging as our physical and digital lives collide even further.
The Empress' New Virtual Clothes
If you think about it, more than 150 years ago Hans Christian Anderson first thought of the idea of wearing clothes that people could not see in the physical world. In his book, The Emperor Has No Clothes, two weavers pretended to make a new suit for the emperor, claiming only those fit for their position could see it. Maybe he wasn't that far off from a trend that is starting to gain steam.

Recently, the idea of creating virtual clothing that does not exist in the real world became a reality. The concept came to fruition because Dutch startup The Fabricant, Dapper Labs and augmented reality artists and creator Johanna Jaskowska combined creative forces to create a digital dress called Iridescence.

What is even crazier than a digital clothing designer, a creator of some of the most prominent Instagram filters, and the creator of the most popular game on the blockchain creating the first ever digital dress, is that it sold for $9,500. Richard Ma, the CEO of QuantumStamp, bought it for his wife, Mary Ren, at Ethereal Summit in New York.

Ma has been quoted as saying that while he admits the digital dress was expensive he bought it because he foresees it as having "long-term value." He went as far as saying that he saw it as an investment.

The idea of a digital dress, which only exists on the Blockchain, is based off of 2D patterns of whoever will wear it using photos given to the designers within 28 days of purchase. The simplest way to think of the digital dress is as a personalized fashion filter that only the owner can use on Instagram and other social media sites.

While Iridescence may not exist in the real word, what gives it value is its existence on the blockchain. When you consider that buying cryptocurrency on the blockchain is an investment in an intangible good, it is easy to see why one might choose to exchange cryptocurrency for a digital dress. Perhaps digital fashion houses like Gucci will offer both digital and physically sustainable versions of their designs in the months to come.
The Environmental Benefits of Digital Couture
In a world trying to blend social distancing, with days spent on Zoom, and sustainability, the idea of a digital wardrobe does not seem so far fetched. Digital couture gives a person the ability to buy virtual fashion they feel fits their persona for photos without the need to go to a store and try on clothes. Much like having your own Zoom background that speaks to your brand and your personality, your digital couture would too.

Another benefit of digital couture is that it saves the earth from being depleted of natural resources used because of and within the fashion industry. The growing trend among more environmentally conscious people has been to buy second hand clothes or clothes made from recycled materials, but digital couture offers another alternative.

According to Unenvironment, the fashion industry produces 20% of global wastewater and 10% of global emissions. Wastewater is water contaminated by human use, and it is a growing problem among the Gen Z which tends to be more environmentally conscious.

Every year, the United States produces 85 trillion liters (a trillion liters is 220 billion gallons) of wastewater. The amount of gallons of wastewater produced in the United States every year is an astronomical number that extends beyond comprehension.

While that is only in the United States, the fashion industry is culpable of 1/5 of the usage of that waste water. The growing trend of digital couture allows environmentally conscious people to look fashionable in the digital world while also preserving the physical world.
Looking Fashionable within a Digital Environment
The growing trend of digital fashion not only allows a person to change their digital persona based on their physical background, but it also allows a person to create a digital persona within a digital world.

LOS ANGELES, - APRIL 23: 15 year-old Yasmin the photographer's daughter, plays Fortnite featuring ... [+]
Getty Images

This growing digital trend allows people in different parts of the world to interact in virtual spaces like Fortnite and Animal Crossing while also outfitting your avatar with the look that best suits you.

For instance, on May 8, Fortnite, which boasts of 350 million registered players, hosted Fortnite Party Royale (a digital concert featuring Steve Aoki, deadmau5, and Dillon Francis). The Skins on Fortnite even inspired a digital street wear collection created by Carlings, a Scandinavian company. Animal Crossing also had its first virtual fashion show where avatars dressed up in current season looks inspired by Loewe, Prada, and GmbH.

This trend is also translating into social virtual reality where you get to customize your avatar to your liking, including your clothes. While fashion choices in social VR are still limited, there is probably a budding entrepreneur out there in the metaverse working on launching their own fashion brand collection solely for avatars.

"In social VR giving your avatar a whole new look through fashion, gives users an opportunity to personalize their avatars, allows them to tailor their look to their own preferences and make them feel personally connected to their virtual self. It's almost like when you were little you dressed up your dolls and lived vicariously through play but with social VR and digital fashion you are the 'Barbie' or 'Ken' doll allowing you to bring forth individuality in an immersive world," said Navah Berg, Social VR Host of The Hive, a show produced in virtual reality.
The Concept of Virtual Try on
With consumers not being able to go to the store for now and try on a pair of jeans or a pair of shoes, many companies are looking at ways to bring their virtual goods for a try on to them in the comfort of their own home. Brands are also seeing an uptick in consumers using augmented reality to virtually try on makeup or even clothes.

"With businesses like SPATIALx, a company on a mission to reinvent physical spaces through Mixed Reality powered retail experiences, they holographically project products through your customer's biometric data profile to find the perfect fit and see what a brand's new fashion line will truly look like. And with return rates for online retail at least 20% higher compared to brick-and-mortar store returns, virtual try ons are the perfect solution for brands and retailers struggling to get consumers into their stores until there is a cure for coronavirus," added Berg.

Virtual try ons could even lead to the minimization of carbon emissions released into the air due to people traveling to clothing stores. With people becoming more conscious about how their buying habits affect the environment, and social distancing becoming a reality, perhaps digital fashion will become more of a norm. Virtual try on and digital couture could lead to a world in which people no longer need to go to stores to try on clothes because they never plan to wear those clothes in the physical world.
The Future of Digital Fashion
According to creative director, curator and independent journalist focused in fashion and immersive tech, Darragh Dandurand, brands need to pay attention to virtual fashion because there is tremendous potential in trying and testing and treating fashion differently than it has ever been treated before. For her, brands, big and small, will need to utilize emerging innovation if they want to stay on top of the overdue sustainability movement and take hold of ever-growing trends that seamlessly blend technological functionality, like IoT, with economical, palatable, and accessible style. The future of retail and commercial clothing brands is no doubt related to the success of the AR & VR industry overall.

Fashion brands of all sizes will need to utilize emerging innovation.
Getty

"Augmented fashion poses a significant development to the way we understand our body movement and our sense of self as linked to materialism; already we project elements of ourselves through our clothing, now with immersive tech we have almost limitless ways to reinvent how we are perceived and experienced. When it comes to all things mixed-reality, we need to remember we can redefine every standard of our current reality," added Dandurand about the benefits of Augmented fashion. "For immersive technologists pursuing relevancy in the fashion industry, sights must be set on prioritizing individualization, specifically taking identity and security into consideration. This is a time to reassess minimalism, function, beauty and value for the future."

While one of the lessons of The Emperor Has No Clothes was that pride causes us to lose sight of how others see us, the sale/investment of a $9,500 virtual dress is that you can look fashionable, be sustainable, and have your own unique way to express yourself via virtual couture.

It would seem that perhaps in this new reality clothes won't make the man/woman, they will make the avatar.

... Read More

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Why Virtual Dresses And Augmented Fashion Are A New Profitable Frontier For Brands

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Fashion week is out! At least that's what luxury brand Gucci has said after they announced they are going seasonless and will only have two shows a year. The pandemic is changing not only consumer behavior but also changing how brands think about their roadmap.

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AR trend in fashion boosted during pandemic 

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AR trend in fashion boosted during pandemic 

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In these difficult times, we've made a number of our coronavirus articles free for all readers. To get all of HBR's content delivered to your inbox, sign up for the Daily Alert newsletter.

Covid-19 has supercharged all things virtual, propelling industries like retail well into the future. According to IBM's 2020 U.S. Retail Index report, the pandemic has accelerated the shift to digital shopping by roughly five years.

Augmented Reality (AR) applications have been on the rise with virtual "try-before-you-buy" experiences ranging from previewing furniture and products in your home with everyday brands like IKEA and Home Depot, to virtually trying on luxury fashion such as Louis Vuitton and Gucci. Once a nice-to-have feature, AR has quickly become an essential technology for retailers.

When Covid-19 temporarily closed jewelry brand Kendra Scott's stores, the retailer introduced an AR tool enabling customers to virtually try-on different earring styles from the comfort of their homes. Using an iPhone and the Safari web browser (no app was required), customers could safely preview the products directly on their ears and make a purchase.

With many physical stores now re-opening, hygiene and safety are a top priority. In response to the pandemic, beauty retailers such as Sephora and Ulta prohibit customers from physically testing makeup products on their skin. Retailers are instead turning to AR to help customers digitally test out thousands of beauty products to assist in buying decisions.

Launched four years ago, Ulta's virtual try-on beauty tool, GLAMlab, has seen a surge in usage since the pandemic. Engagement has increased seven-fold, and more than 50 million shades of foundation have been swatched digitally with the app post-Covid.

According to a Neilsen global survey from 2019, consumers listed Augmented and Virtual Reality as the top technologies they're seeking to assist them in their daily lives. In fact, just over half (51%) said they were willing to use this technology to assess products. I fully expect that interest has since soared as we've seen AR shift from being sometimes gimmicky to now solving real pain points for customers, especially amid the pandemic. In fact, e-commerce company Shopify recently released new data that interactions with products having AR content showed a 94% higher conversion rate than products without AR.

Retailers are also beginning to use AR technology to reimagine the digital shopping experience with virtual store fronts. In May, retailer Kohl's collaborated with Snapchat to create Kohl's AR Virtual Closet. Using a smartphone and the Snapchat app, consumers can step inside an AR dressing room, mix and match items, and make a purchase without ever leaving the app (or their home).

Items available for purchase in the Kohl's AR Virtual Closet are continually updated based on consumer needs. The experience launched with top spring styles and shifted to an assortment of active and athleisure items as shoppers searched for comfortable work-from-home apparel. The newest iteration features back-to-school season items with an assortment of Levi's products. Customers can also use the new Selfie Lens feature to picture themselves in the Levi's Trucker Jacket.

Levi's is a brand that is further complementing its AR retail strategy with digital tools like Squad, an online co-watching video app where friends can shop together. The app launched in April as a way to recreate some of the social experiences people miss and have been craving amid the pandemic.

The next phase of augmented retail will likely be a gamified social experience. Burberry recently partnered with Snapchat on an in-store AR game, and I can see the concept being extended to digital store fronts and virtual closets where you can play, explore, and shop with friends. This coincides with a current trend popular among fashion and beauty brands such as Estée Lauder, Gucci, and Miu Miu: mobile arcade games. Burberry's "B Surf" mobile racing game even featured AR face filters and characters as prizes. Fashion and beauty companies applying this digital entertainment approach are benefitting by connecting with new, younger consumers. "We know that they are living in an increasingly gamified environment both online and offline and we are excited that they can join the Burberry community - and explore our new puffer collection - in this way," said Mark Morris, Senior Vice President of Digital Commerce at Burberry.

Which leads us to another emerging area in augmented retail and digital shopping: virtual goods as commodities. We're already seeing the sale of virtual merchandise from luxury retailers like Louis Vuitton offering digital skins (branded clothing and accessories to dress characters with) in the esports game League of Legends. Consumer spending on gaming loot boxes and skins worldwide is predicted to hit $50 billion (USD) by 2022.

Virtual try-on experiences are an excellent use case for AR in retail: allowing consumers to preview products to scale digitally in their own homes, on their own bodies, and then instantly purchasing the corresponding physical product. But what if in addition to physical items, you could buy virtual objects, such as jewelry, apparel, or art, for which there may or may not be a physical counterpart? Here's a speculative demo I created last year imagining what that could look like in AR with Apple Pay. Additionally, here's how I imagine this idea working with video-conferencing tools like Zoom. Virtual objects are a way for consumers to interact with, try-on, and even own a part of a brand that might not otherwise be accessible.

The closest example we've seen today of AR goods for purchase has been in the art world. In March, artist Brian Donnelly (a.k.a. KAWS) debuted an AR art exhibition entitled "Expanded Holiday" in collaboration with Acute Art. The app featured AR sculptures you could rent for $7 per week or $30 for a month. We're also seeing hints of this new retail model in the digital fashion arena with virtual garments. But instead of dressing characters in games with these "digital skins," we're now outfitting ourselves.

I predict a rise in saleable virtual goods with a new type of augmented retail. Impacted by the pandemic, it's a trend I'm labelling the "digital lipstick effect." The "lipstick effect" has historically referred to consumers continuing to spend on small luxury items, even during recessions and economic downturns. Lipstick as a potentially accessible product becomes a metaphor in today's times, analogous to digital lipstick, or any virtual good.

As I wrote in Augmented Human, the old rulebook of how we understand and interact within the real world no longer applies, and in many mays, the pandemic has been a catalyst for this digital transformation. Physical retail must evolve in response, and AR has proven that it can add enormous value for consumers in the shopping journey. Now is the time for business leaders and brands to not only re-imagine retail, but to catapult these immersive shopping experiences into the future.

If our content helps you to contend with coronavirus and other challenges, please consider subscribing to HBR. A subscription purchase is the best way to support the creation of these resources.

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How AR Is Redefining Retail in the Pandemic

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In these difficult times, we've made a number of our coronavirus articles free for all readers. To get all of HBR's content delivered to your inbox, sign up for the Daily Alert newsletter. Covid-19 has supercharged all things virtual, propelling industries like retail well into the future. According to IBM's 2020 U.S.

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Amazon soon to launch virtual fitting rooms 

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Amazon soon to launch virtual fitting rooms 

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Amazon's newest technology is meant to revolutionize the way we shop for clothing online. The retail giant is developing an app that will work as a virtual fitting room so shoppers can try on clothes prior to purchase.

The patent is still in its early stages, however it is known that the potential app would need access to personal data in order to act as a personal stylist and produce images of shoppers wearing outfits they are considering purchasing.

The app would utilize photos saved on a phone to create an Augmented Reality image of the shopper wearing items available for sale. Shoppers could swipe to either like or dislike the clothing items shown, and use search terms like "search my look," "randomize" or "find more like this."

The app would also have the ability to suggest other categories of items it believes might interest the shopper.

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Amazon developing a virtual fitting room app

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Amazon's newest technology is meant to revolutionize the way we shop for clothing online. The retail giant is developing an app that will work as a virtual fitting room so shoppers can try on clothes prior to purchase. The patent is still in its

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New York - Singapore-based fashion technology startup BlinQ plans to tap into the booming South Asian luxury e-commerce market and turn their augmented reality fitting rooms into the go-to tech in the region.

According to a recent McKinsey's global fashion report, the personal luxury market is estimated to be 300 billion dollars as of today, growing up to 500 billion dollars by 2020. Asia currently holds a circa 45 percent of the market.

Bob Chua, BlinQ's founder explained to 'BusinessWire' that "BlinQ uses AR and Algorithmic patterns to provide users with the latest trends and personalised fittings from their digital devices. It also allows users to choose how they would like to consume fashion, which may not necessarily be to buy, but to also rent, subscribe, or pay later for latest luxury designs from major and upcoming brands across SE Asia".

Chua further outlined his company's plans to fuse the "successful models of ASOS, Farfetch, Rent-the-Runway and The Real Real into a single platform, while targeting affluent Asians. The multi-brand and multi-mode platform allows for a wider audience to be able to enjoy luxury...especially amongst millennials."

At a later stage, the startup will monetise their platform by white-labelling our virtual changing room AR (Augmented Reality) features to other e-commerce sites, "which will ultimately reduce returns (currently estimated at 60 percent of all online purchases) and increase purchasing propensity (estimated to drive 30 percent-40 percent more sales due to trying before buying)."

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BlinQ brings augmented reality to the online luxury fashion market

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New York - Singapore-based fashion technology startup BlinQ plans to tap into the booming South Asian luxury e-commerce market and turn their augmented reality fitting rooms into the go-to tech in the region. According to a recent McKinsey's global fashion report, the personal luxury market is estimated to be 300 billion dollars as of today, growing up to 500 billion dollars by 2020.

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1. the majority of the world feels curious about the AI technologies, while Asia, Africa and South America are among geographical locations where customers feel the most optimistic and hopeful about the technology. Meanwhile The survey particularly highlights the growing trends and popularity of the AI technology in Asia, it also concluded that the main age of AI interested consumer is 19-24, mostly male and some female.

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Respondents aged 19 - 44 were most likely to be "very interested" in learning more about AI (52%).

Respondents 65 and over were most likely to say they are somewhat interested in learning more about AI (64%)

South Americans (61%) and Africans (63%) said they were most interested in learning more about AI.

When we look at this data as a whole, what story does it start to tell us?

People are concerned about artificial intelligence. They are also curious and hopeful and excited for what it might bring--as long as it doesn't bring about world destruction. People are also somewhat interested in learning more about AI. They might not be super excited about it yet, but they are open minded and aware that they need to pay attention. This is good.

Over the next couple of years, Mozilla plans to focus on making sure the world builds trustworthy AI. We want to help people understand that we all can and should have a say in when algorithms and computers are making decisions for us.

Mozilla believes in making data open and accessible to everyone. If you would like to go deeper into this survey data, here are links to dig in:

Mozilla is releasing this data to the public domain under CC0.

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We Asked People Around the World How They Feel About Artificial Intelligence. Here's What We Learned.

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Respondents aged 19 - 44 were most likely to be "very interested" in learning more about AI (52%). Respondents 65 and over were most likely to say they are somewhat interested in learning more about AI (64%) South Americans (61%) and Africans (63%) said they were most interested in learning more about AI.

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One of the examples for the use of the technology in the early time of it’s retail development

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Dive Brief:

Macy's has launched virtual reality furniture shopping experiences in about 70 of its stores nationwide, with plans to expand the capabilities to 20 more stores by January 2019, according to a Macy's press release that claimed the offering is the largest in-store VR rollout in retail history.

The retailer is working with Marxent, a technology company whose 3D Cloud service is a content management and hosting platform for VR and augmented reality applications. The system in place at Macy's stores allows shoppers to design a living space with 3D furniture images, and use VR headsets to move through the space virtually to see if they like it before purchasing anything.

The news comes after Macy's and Marxent ran pilot VR programs in three stores, and found that "VR-influenced furniture sales have increased by more than 60 percent versus non-VR furniture sales," while also leading to a lower than 2% merchandise return rate, the release stated.

Dive Insight:

This announcement makes official a rollout that Macy's CEO Jeff Gennette outlined in some detail last month at Recode's Code Commerce event. But, this week's news is also more ambitious than what Gennette discussed then, a plan encompassing 90 stores total by January.

Additionally, Macy's also said it is debuting an augmented reality furniture experience called "See Your Space IRL," which lets users of the Macy's iOS mobile app virtually place images of Macy's furniture in their own living spaces. The app is similar to several others in the furniture space, many of which broke out around the same time last year.

So far, most commitments to using VR as an in-store marketing tool have been limited to no more than a handful of stores, but Macy's commitment to the technology could spur other retailers to embrace VR experiences to a similar extent.

VR technology has had a long and bumpy ride to get to this point. A few years ago, it was considered too expensive to deploy in large volumes, and retailers seemed uncertain about use cases. More recently, a proliferation of mobile AR-enabled shopping apps similar to the one Macy's unveiled with its VR plans, many of them from furniture and home decor retailers , may have paved the way for more retailers to bet on VR experiences as well.

Still, any retailer considering deploying VR technology in-store likely needs to justify the cost with evidence it can help drive sales and reduce returns, or contributes to operational and marketing efficiencies. Macy's was able to check boxes for all of the above, according to the company. It also allowed Macy's to virtually expand its in-store inventory and showcase spaces even while maintaining smaller physical stores.

The latter is especially important as Macy's continues to look for ways to keep brick-and-mortar costs under control. If it can maintain smaller store square footage while offering increasingly rich virtual shopping experiences to customers who come through its doors, that may be an edge over competitors.

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Macy's expanding VR furniture shopping to 90 stores by January

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Macy's has launched virtual reality furniture shopping experiences in about 70 of its stores nationwide, with plans to expand the capabilities to 20 more stores by January 2019, according to a Macy's press release that claimed the offering is the largest in-store VR rollout in retail history.

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The transformation of the e-commerce with the start of pandemic 

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The transformation of the e-commerce with the start of pandemic 

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In the interview of several industry leaders it had been established that the key focus of the future retail are AR and VR technologies

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It's been said that the e-commerce growth we've seen since March 2020 would've taken years to achieve if COVID-19, the global pandemic forcing people around the world to stay home, had not accelerated trends. Indeed the events of the second quarter of the year have changed e-commerce dramatically.

Throughout the 2010s, there was experimentation with digital tools aimed at helping establish apparel fit before buying ("fit tech"), providing augmented reality (AR) try-ons, offering social shopping experiences and more. While getting fit right on the first try was an important endeavor toward lowering online return rates and increasing profitability, in-store returns were always easy enough for many customers. AR felt like a nice-to-have but not-completely-trusted proxy for real life. And social shopping never really took off in the United States.

But as consumers have had more time at home to spend on social media and e-commerce penetration as a percent of retail spend has grown from 11% in 2019 to 15% this year as stores have been closed, the stakes feel higher for new or underutilized e-commerce tools that previously may have been managed on the periphery of the core as "innovation projects." Now, they're becoming just another cost of doing business for retailers and brands that need to sell more and connect more without the benefit of their primary brick-and-mortar channel. And they're solidifying themselves as basic expectations among shoppers whose needs can no longer be met in stores.

First, anyone who's traveled, especially to Asia, in the past decade has wondered why QR codes aren't the norm in North America. The obvious use for them will be as a sanitary, touchless payment option in retail stores. But for e-commerce, think about their value as a vehicle for enhanced product information, as 1-800-Flowers recently did in connection with a unique bouquet collaboration with Jason Wu. This is one way to make more special e-commerce deliveries stand out from what now feels like a daily deluge of household staples arriving in nondescript boxes.

QR codes also can play an important role in jumpstarting AR experiences on which consumers need or want to rely more heavily now. Jon Cheney, Founder/CEO of Seek, an AR software company he says has grown 300% since March. Further, Cheney cites a 600% increase in AR usage on Seek's clients' websites in the same period, with furniture retailers, including Overstock, leading the way. It's no wonder: In one recent furniture pilot Seek ran, session length when AR was used was 26 minutes (vs. 9 minutes for the control group) and order size was $1900 (vs. $1200). Conversion increased by 100%. Cheney sees AR impact for the furniture and appliances sector growing as AR wearable devices become mainstream, at which point retailers without AR selling tools will be left behind.

"The pandemic and the concurrent shift to digital has made Seek busier than ever because brands are understanding the best way to see an item online is through augmented reality. Seek's customer data shows conversion rates are increasing anywhere from 10% to as much as 200%, product returns are dropping by 25% and time to make buying decisions has been cut in half," says Cheney.

The opportunity extends to shoes and, soon for Seek, jewelry: Cheney revealed this week that his company is weeks away from releasing a web-based ring try-on tool, "an industry first that will allow jewelry companies to offer ring try-ons directly from their mobile browser by training the camera to recognize a customer's hand and then be able to recognize which finger she or he wants the ring to go on." Rings are just one example and, "bringing these technologies directly to the web [across product categories] will be game-changing," states Cheney.

Leyla Foschi, Social Lead at digital marketing agency PMG, attributes some of the growth in AR usage not just to consumer needs, but as a way to fill time. She explains, "Snapchat reported that time spent with their AR lenses was up 25% [since stay-at-home practices began]. AR has been around for a long while, but COVID-19 has accelerated its adoption. Now, users and brands are much more comfortable with the technology. Brands who widely adopt AR first will be at the forefront of a tightened purchase path."

Since last October, beauty brand Smashbox has been on a mission to reach and engage the next generation of consumers in the camera, and has partnered with AR platform Camera IQ to bring AR experiences to life across social and video chat platforms. "As consumers adjusted to life at home, the use case for AR has accelerated beyond a fun and lighthearted way to connect with friends. It is now fully ingrained in both our personal and professional lives," says Samantha Citro Alexander, Smashbox's Director of Consumer Engagement & Integrated Marketing for North America. "And as online shopping has accelerated, it has also become an essential tool for try-on and product discovery," she went on to say.

As a case in point, Smashbox's "Halo" AR experience (launched in late February to promote their new Halo Fresh Perfecting Powder and Halo Highlighting Duo) has reached over 4,320 minutes, or 3 full days, of play time. More importantly, the percent of users who engaged with the AR functionality after viewing Smashbox' Instagram story and has nearly quadrupled since January. Based on these self-reported metrics, the brand feels the media value of AR has proven, time and again, to outperform.

Despite increased engagement with AR, the experience may impact the path to purchase without removing the need to touch and feel merchandise. Michelle Collins, Founder/President of [a] Non-Agency, observes, "The trouble with these [fashion try-on] AR apps are that they fail to factor in weight and comfort... the AR experience helps refine the choice, but will require actual product trial." However, these tools may reduce the extent to which retailers are shipping options that are unlikely to drive conversion or are more likely to result in a return.

On the other hand, Oshiya Savur, VP of U.S. Marketing and Education at Revlon, who points out how COVID-19 has accelerated several underlying trends, says, regarding beauty, "So far online channels have largely been replenishment occasions or pure discovery for reviews and claims. Quite honestly, trial and consumer engagement have been hard to drive. However, with acceleration of purchases being made online, we find that trial occasions are also happening online. In the case of beauty categories, where shade match to skin tone is critical, we have seen a rise of AR adoption both at the retailer level and consumer level."

When it comes to virtual reality (VR), Collins is more optimistic about retailers using virtual store visits to identify needed business changes than about their driving conversion among customers. "Virtual visits to stores seem less likely to support buying, but do seem effective in supporting the planning experience. [VR] is an effective tool for replacing the complicated floor plans [in] large-scale hospitality and retail environments," she says.

But some companies see new consumer-facing use cases for VR. One of those is Beautyque NYC, which had planned to open a physical location this summer providing a selection of wellness brands with exposure, product displays, marketing and events. Instead, the nascent company pivoted and created what it claims is the first 3D virtual in-store experience in its industry in May 2020. "Instead of developing another regular e-commerce website, which sounded boring, we decided to push the technology and create the closest possible experience to a physical store, giving the consumer the sensations of being in a real store," explains Sonia Khemiri, Beautyque NYC Co-founder.

The company reports strong interest from brands, naming Rejucream as an example of an early stage brand that's signed on and AmazingCosmetics as a more established player now on board. According to Beautyque NYC, both brands are looking for some sort of customer engagement; Rejucream to gain traction and awareness and AmazingCosmetics to expand into a new community and be part of an innovative retail initiative.

Emily Rudman, Founder of beauty brand Emilie Heathe, thinks the multi-brand digital concept model makes sense when the fee to participate is relatively low in proportion to the sales potential, which brands typically keep. She's grateful for those "using this time to be creative about their selling and retail strategy, knowing they're at times supporting new or small businesses."

Rudman, Rejucream and AmazingCosmetics aren't the only ones intrigued by a virtual storefront: In late April, VR e-commerce startup Obsess reported a 300% increase in inbound inquiries in the prior four weeks, compared with an average month in early 2019.

"As more people move online, [retailers and brands] need to think about how they can leverage their infrastructure," says Melissa Jackson-Parsey, Chief Strategy Officer of B-Reel, which developed an immersive "Digital Boutique" for Hublot pre-pandemic that's now expected to represent 10-15% of the watch company's U.S. sales this year and may expand to other markets. The goal, Jackson continues, is to, "create experiences online that are as differentiated as those found in-store... The definition of e-commerce, and its place as part of a brand's omnichannel offering has to evolve. From templated, transactional experiences, e-commerce has the potential to become as delightful and additive to the brand as in-store experiences once were, and perhaps even better."

While true, certain sectors, including watches, jewelry and wine, historically have been slower to embrace digital. Laetitia Hirschy, Founder/CEO of Kaaviar PR, a luxury marketing and communications firm, says, "Luxury brands are still trying to avoid a cash-for-goods transaction and retain a more special experience but, with almost all shopping now taking place online, they've had to adapt. Simply offering a luxury good online without the guidance of a knowledgeable sales advisor throughout the purchase experience can be insufficient to justify spending thousands of dollars with just a click."

To create socially distanced paths to purchase, Hirschy says many luxury brands have "finally" added a chat function or 1:1 video appointments on their websites and that doing so can help generate up to $100,000 per week in revenue. "The key to success is being available when the customer reaches out, usually spontaneously," Hirschy concludes. Savur, who talks about recently-accelerated trends, validates this: "In luxury categories which are high touch and high service, we are seeing brands offering virtual consultations on their owned channels, through their trained staff, to their consumers."

This doesn't need to mean reinventing the wheel nor adopting slick new technology: Some companies are simply doubling down on what they were already doing with existing digital tools. Helen Aboah, CEO of UrbanZen, A Philosophy of Living By Donna Karan, that sells apparel, footwear, jewelry, artisanal products and home furnishings, said the closure of stores quickly meant 1:1 Zoom and FaceTime customer appointments and extended hours for e-commerce live chats with store associates for questions regarding fit, size and personal styling.

"We offer consultations and sales appointments with our retail specialists that can be booked online or over the phone. We continued to provide the personal experience customers know us for through our digital channels and that required meeting our customer where and how they are most comfortable during quarantine, at home," Aboah continued, before adding, "Our wellness lifestyle programming which was happening in our retail stores are now being offered digitally through Instagram and on our e-commerce site. The response has been incredible; we have seen record level engagement on Instagram and e-commerce sales."

Still, not every experience featuring humans can - or should - be 1:1. Sayur, of Revlon, points out, "While in China, livestreaming is already driving a lot of commerce, we are finding tech innovation in this space in the U.S. There is still a ways to go in terms of adoption by retailers but we do expect that this will be the new wave of creating engagement online."

L'Oréal Group brands including Urban Decay, Lancôme, NYX Cosmetics and It Cosmetics have been offering shoppable livestreams on their brand sites in North America during the pandemic. Among Estee Lauder's brands, Bobbi Brown, Clinique and Kiehl's first hosted these events after the quarantine began in March. But while China has Tmall to host livestreaming events, the U.S. lacks a comparable platform since Instagram Live still isn't shoppable. So while business results are difficult to quantify, international evidence combined with recent adoption suggests there's reason for optimism.

The power of QR codes, AR, VR, video chat and livestreaming isn't just the number of people engaging with these right now. Deloitte's back-to-college survey, released today, reports that 10% of consumers plan to use emerging technology more as part of their upcoming shopping journeys than in the past. While that may not sound like much, Rod Sides, Vice Chairman, Deloitte LLP, and U.S. Retail, Wholesale and Distribution Leader, provides the context that historically almost no one has said they planned to do so. Similarly, 29% of back-to-school shoppers surveyed said they'll use at least one new technology in 2020, which he points out is double last year's rate.

Beyond all of the benefits discussed above, Sides links emerging technology to the trend toward frictionless commerce, asserting that, "Convenience continues to rise in its importance relative to price and product." For retailer and brands, including those approaching Deloitte for consulting services, the discussion extends to the bottom line and "how you use new tools to bend the cost curve permanently," says Side.

Whether it's leveraging marketing expenses with AR tools that go viral, using AR to convert more and reduce returns, deepening engagement to sell more via VR, developing fruitful long-term relationships by connecting 1:1 or livestreaming to connect with the masses, there's more consumer openness and more business need than ever before for new e-commerce experiences. Sides concludes, "Retailers that can stay nimble and react quickly to changing needs amid the challenges of COVID-19, will likely be the ones that will have an opportunity to appeal shoppers this season."

... Read More

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The New E-Commerce Experiences Driving Results

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Whether it's using AR to convert more and reduce returns, deepening engagement to sell more via VR, developing fruitful long-term relationships by connecting 1:1 or livestreaming to connect with the masses, there's more consumer openness and business need than ever for new e-commerce experiences.

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Detailed explanation of the most efficient use of VR in retail and e-commerce , possibilities, opportunities. History of the company 

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Detailed explanation of the most efficient use of VR in retail and e-commerce , possibilities, opportunities. History of the company 

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2017 became a very significant year in the history of the VR retail industry with an establishment of the company-Obsess which is specialising in “breaking the standards of the  typical online shopping procedure and creating an exciting experience out of it” according to Obsess team member Amrita Maria. Through 3D commerce cloud the young company offers a B2B service -   Creating interactive and engaging VR shops for the brands  globally. Unlike it’s predecessors the Obsess technology is situated on  company’s cloud server whole being fully integrated to brand’s e-commerce website and  are available to access with the fast loading speed  by simply clicking the link. As it is fully integrated with the brand’s official website, the product information and availability constantly updates like in a standard online shop. There is also  no need for VR glasses any longer since  now consumer can simply use a phone screen and make decisions where to go and what to see  via touch screen  ( similar to travelling  through locations  street view in Google earth  or Google maps ) rather than through eye movement reading as in  Alibaba and Ebay VR.  Since the start of its work in 2018 until now the company has  already created numerous virtual flagships, retail stores and pop-ups  for both fashion and beauty brands such as Coach, Marni, Christian Dior perfumes, Ralph Lauren, Levi’s, Farfetch and Charlotte Tilbury- obsessar.com

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Virtual Stores & 3D E-commerce Solutions

We've partnered with the world's leading brands and retailers to create more than 300 virtual stores and experiences.

IMPACT

Consumer interactions in Obsess-powered virtual stores

DRIVE BRAND EQUITY & LOYALTY

Higher time spent than traditional e-commerce for a leading Consumer Goods Brand

TAP INTO FIRST PARTY DATA

Email + SMS opt-in rate in the virtual store for a Luxury Men's Grooming Brand

116M+

Consumer interactions in Obsess-powered virtual stores

10X

Higher time spent than traditional e-commerce for a leading Consumer Goods Brand

70%

Email + SMS opt-in rate in the virtual store for a Luxury Men's Grooming Brand

Solutions

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Virtual Stores

Reimagine engagement through immersive, 3D-rendered 360 experiences.

HD quality, 3D CGI virtual stores, custom designed for brands in every industry-such as Fashion, Beauty, Media & Entertainment, CPG and more.

Solutions

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Gamified Commerce

Level-up engagement through custom, branded games and quizzes.

Connect with a gaming-native generation of consumers through custom games and quizzes that incentivize product discovery, brand memorability, purchase intent and first-party data collection.

Solutions

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Social Shopping

Build community and connect consumers with your brand, wherever they are.

Make your virtual shopping experience feel more social, life-like and memorable with social commerce features that enable personalized and true-to-life peer-to-peer engagement.

Solutions

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Product Customizers

Empower your customers to create personalized products, looks & scenery-and make your brand all their own.

Welcome customers into your virtual experience by name, create bespoke collections for your VIPs or enable shoppers to customize their own products and looks from your brand's catalog.

E-commerce Integration

We integrate seamlessly with your e-commerce site, including cart functionality.

Data Visualization

Track real-time customer data from your virtual store using our data visualization platform, tailored specifically for your brand's goals.

The Obsess platform contains built-in internationalization functionality, intended to help efficiently scale your business globally. We've created virtual stores in 45+ countries with over 30 languages supported. Our customers use our technology to drive demand in new markets as they grow.

The Obsess platform contains built-in internationalization functionality, intended to help efficiently scale your business globally. We've created virtual stores in 45+ countries with over 30 languages supported. Our customers use our technology to drive demand in new markets as they grow.

Shop with Friends

Live group shopping brings community engagement and social proof into the virtual space.

Virtual Events

Make digital shopping more social through livestream videos, avatar meetups and group shopping events.

Branded Avatars

Walking, talking, fully customizable avatars enable consumers to personalize their characters, and feel even more connected to your brand.

Custom Gamification

Adding features such as memory games, scavenger hunts and quizzes promotes increased interaction and incentivizes product discovery.

Interactive Media

In-scene videos and interactive 3D content create more immersive, memorable VR/AR experiences.

FEATURES

Shop with Friends

Live group shopping brings community engagement and social proof into the virtual space.

Custom Gamification

Adding features such as memory games, scavenger hunts and quizzes promotes increased interaction and incentivizes product discovery.

Branded Avatars

Walking, talking, fully customizable avatars enable consumers to personalize their characters, and feel even more connected to your brand.

Virtual Events

Make digital shopping more social through livestream videos, avatar meetups and group shopping events.

Interactive Media

In-scene videos and interactive 3D content create more immersive, memorable VR/AR experiences.

© 2023 Obsess, Inc. all rights reserved.

Resources

Obsess is the leading experiential e-commerce platform enabling brands and retailers to serve immersive and highly interactive 3D virtual experiences that drive conversion, customer engagement, and brand loyalty amongst a new generation of gaming-fluent consumers. Obsess uses its proprietary virtual shopping platform and VR/AR technology to enable brands and retailers to set up 3D 360 digital storefronts on their websites.

© 2023 Obsess, Inc. all rights reserved.

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Obsess is the leading experiential e-commerce platform enabling brands and retailers to serve immersive and highly interactive 3D virtual stores that drive customer engagement, purchase likelihood and brand loyalty amongst a new generation of gaming-fluent consumers.

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New York, United States - Pantone's 2019 colour of the year is "Living Coral," and so Obsess, a new fashion website, created an underwater store filled with coral-hued product.

The glass walls and ceiling look out into the ocean, and a gigantic coral reef sits at the centre of the store, surrounded by racks of tops, Topshop slip dresses and Senreve handbags.

Of course, no such underwater boutique actually exists. Obsess created its space online, relying on virtual-reality technology to create a shopping experience it hopes comes close enough to the real thing to stand out from countless other e-commerce sites.

"With the latest technology on our phones, we should be seeing shopping experiences online that are much more visual and much more interesting," said Neha Singh, Obsess's founder and chief executive. "The problem is that nobody has tackled changes to the e-commerce experience in 25 years."

Obsess is a software company that is building virtual reality shopping sites. The start-up has been around since 2017, building VR experiences for companies like Tommy Hilfiger, Levi's and Farfetch, and today, it's launchings its first e-commerce destination. It has pre-seed funding of $775,000 from Lightspeed Ventures, Techstars and from Village Global, a new venture fund that includes money from entrepreneurs like Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos.

The website has no search box. Instead, there are different boutiques, all created in CGI: beauty, fitness, travel, wellness, handbags and more. Shoppers can move around the virtual boutiques, click on the product to see them in 3D, and even access augmented reality versions of them, to place them in their setting.

Nobody has tackled changes to the e-commerce experience in 25 years.

The goal of Obsess, said Singh, is to move e-commerce software "move beyond the grid" - that is, evolve beyond the classic thumbnail listings on a white background that's typically found in e-commerce.

Many shoppers find the online user experience underwhelming. Online shopping accounted for 14.3 percent of total retail sales last year, according to Internet Retailer. That number is growing, but only 2.86 percent of website visits convert into a purchase, according to e-commerce data source Monetate. This is a key reason why some brands have been experimenting with alternative forms of communication like live chat with customers, and why digital brands like Everlane and Third Love, which previously promised to stay away from brick and mortar, are now opening stores.

"Amazon created the original e-commerce interface, but that was intended for books and even though it became the norm, nobody has stopped to think if this is the best way to sell online," Neha said.

Anne Dwane, a partner at Village Global, said the fund invested in Obsess because it believes AR e-commerce experiences can unlock more profit. Singh said Obsess has already seen triple-digit revenue growth since 2017.

"There are clearly problems to fix in the e-commerce experience because the grid format for searchability doesn't reflect human behaviour," Dwane said.

Plenty of fashion brands have already tried to integrate augmented and virtual reality into their online footprint to make e-commerce more exciting. In June, launched an augmented reality app that allows shoppers to try on shoes digitally; Nike rolled out similar technology last year, allowing shoppers to look at limited edition sneakers before buying them. Amazon has been investing in AR technology too, including smart glasses, Focals, which debuted in October from the Amazon-funded start-up North.

Goat, the digital sneaker marketplace launched an AR experience in May, starting with a Travis Scott Air Jordan. The company said 80 percent of shoppers who bought the sneaker used the AR technology, and Goat plans to roll the technology out to other footwear too.

Fashion publishers have been taking at AR e-commerce too. Goop just launched a digital version of its new Toronto store, and shoppers can browse the store and buy Goop product; little buttons throughout the digital store even open to videos of Gwyneth Paltrow reviewing the product.

In June, fashion influencer Leandra Medine 's Man Repeller debuted an interactive page for the company's branded bags, earrings, and hairclips. When shoppers press the "Play" on the page, products show up animated and moving, and the page includes trippy graphics and piano keys that actually play music.

Prior to launching Obsess, Singh worked at Google and also served as head of product for Vogue.com for nearly four years. She said she witnessed how frustrated fashion brands felt with their digital presence, and realised that even the most successful fashion companies hadn't bothered to change the look of online shopping.

"These luxury brands have amazing runway shows and great retail stores, but their online experience is really underwhelming," Neha said. "I feel it too, personally, because I love shopping but I hate online shopping. It's boring and isn't inspiring."

These luxury brands have amazing runway shows and great retail stores, but their online experience is really underwhelming.

Singh said brands that have hired Obsess to build product for them saw a 150 percent increased session time and a conversation rate that was twice as high as its typical e-commerce pages. Average order values were also 15 percent higher, she said, which might be why has predicted that experiential e-commerce is going to be one of the factors that drive fashion e-commerce growth over the next four years.

Obsess's business model leans on affiliate links; earning money off of purchases of the products its engineers have built into the virtual boutiques. Singh says the Obsess site will eventually turn to a marketplace model, where it will charge to create brand-specific boutiques. Singh also sees an opportunity to license the Obsess software to brands for other CGI opportunities, like fashion shoots.

"Fashion doesn't have to go to a desert to stage a photoshoot because you can just create one with technology," she said. "Brands that want to compete against Amazon will have to build brand loyalty online, and for us, we think that's done with technology that makes online shopping inspiring."
Would You Buy a Virtual Pair of Nikes? A New (Augmented) Reality for Brands and Retailers Beauty's Augmented Reality Revolution: What's Real, What's Hype, What's Next

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E-Commerce Is Boring. A Jeff Bezos-Backed Start-Up Wants to Change That.

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New York, United States - Pantone's 2019 colour of the year is "Living Coral," and so Obsess, a new fashion website, created an underwater store filled with coral-hued product. The glass walls and ceiling look out into the ocean, and a gigantic coral reef sits at the centre of the store, surrounded by racks of tops, Topshop slip dresses and Senreve handbags.

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Statistics on the demand for the Obsess.AR service 

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Statistics on the demand for the Obsess.AR service 

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According to Liz Flora  from glossy.com, in 2020 obsess company had experienced  “300% increase  in Inbound interest”in 4 weeks compared to the beginning of 2019 average monthly interest

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Once an omnichannel experiment for a handful of innovation-focused brands, VR e-commerce is now seeing accelerated demand.

VR e-commerce technology is one of the many digital opportunities, like Shanghai luxury art mall K11 launched a virtual store via a WeChat Mini Program that allowed users to tour the mall and purchase from AI beauty tools and virtual consultations , that brands are seeking to offset losses from physical store closures. VR e-commerce startup Obsess, for example, has seen a 300% increase in inbound inquiries over the last four weeks, compared to the average monthly number from the beginning of 2019. The company recently worked with Dior to launch a virtual version of the luxury brand's Champs-Élysées store in Paris in February. In China, 46 different brand stores.

Dior's VR store offers shoppers of its French website a 360-degree, 3D e-commerce experience. Users can virtually browse the store's Maison Christian Dior collection of fragrances, soaps, candles and lotions, and then zoom in on items and buy through the brand's online shop. The brand has been expanding its e-commerce presence across geographies in recent years, selling a selection of fashion and beauty items.

Dior's online store was developed with Obsess before the recent store closures. Ulta, Tommy Hilfiger, Farfetch and Levi's are among others that have created their VR retail experiences with the company. Obsess founder and CEO Neha Singh said that Dior's main motivation had originally been to share its Paris store with "a wide audience" that would not have have had the chance to see it in Paris.

"We are more targeting the younger generation," said Singh, who noted that because younger people are larger consumers of esports and gaming, "they're so used to this interface; they already understand how it works." But she also noted that the look and feel of the experience needs to be more high-end than video games for beauty and luxury retailers. "For a brand, I don't want it to look like a low-tech video game. The quality is so important; they need that for preserving their brand and their aesthetic," said Singh.

And lately, they're more willing to explore the technology. "We are now talking to almost every brand we had ever wanted to talk to, and they are reaching out to us," said Singh. "Last month has been our busiest month."

One main thing brands are losing as their stores are shut down is the effect of browsing.

"Today's e-commerce interface is great for directed shopping, which means you know what you're looking for; you can search for it, but it's not really the best experience for discovery," said Singh.

Marie Driscoll, the managing director of luxury and fashion at Coresight, agreed. "The grid model is just so boring. People don't just shop just because they need things. People shop to discover, learn and find out about new products."

A selling point being made by VR tech companies is not just that the technology creates a more entertaining shopping experience for customers, but that it drives sales. According to Singh, the company's VR stores have a 70% higher conversion rate than traditional grid e-commerce. However, the company did not have data on how many shoppers opt-in to the VR store experience.

Driscoll said beauty and luxury brands are among the segments best suited to this kind of technology. "Luxury has been slow to come on board with online, and many brands do not offer their full assortment, but if they can provide a wonderful experience online [including with other technologies like livestreaming and consultations with store associates], it's going to be a game changer," she said.

Singh said Obsess shoots photos of physical stores for clients, but noted that brands have also shown interest in completely different virtual models that are not based on physical stores. Ulta adopted this format to display emerging brands via its Sparked program that launched last year.

This VR storefront already has presence in China: In 2018, Valentino launched a virtual store on Alibaba e-tailer Tmall allowing users to virtually tour the brand's physical Beijing pop-up and purchase items on the shelves through Tmall. Amazon India has also experimented with this technology.

VR stores have a chance to become a more permanent feature if brands can see a return on investment from the technology. Singh said the technology is also being considered by brands for B2B purposes including wholesale showrooms and virtual conferences with livestreaming incorporated.

Driscoll predicted that when stores open again, the transition back to retail will be gradual due to fear of going to stores in public. Although physical retail will remain an important sales channel, she said that "the transition to online adoption is going to stick."

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Brands look to VR e-commerce to replace the in-store experience - Glossy

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VR e-commerce technology is one of the many digital opportunities, like AI beauty tools and virtual consultations, that brands are seeking to offset losses from physical store closures. During the Covid-19 shutdown in China, Shanghai luxury art mall K11 launched a virtual store via a WeChat Mini Program that allowed users to tour the mall and purchase from 46 different brand stores.

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The justification of why the VR is the future for retail 

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The justification of why the VR is the future for retail 

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“What I find most interesting about this topic is that it opens the door for companies that don't currently have a large presence in retail to create a new retail model and disrupt the status quo of Amazon, Walmart and other large retail leaders.”

“I believe that the next big thing in retail will be the use of virtual reality (VR) to give consumers the opportunity to virtually shop from the comfort of their home, while providing them with an ultra-realistic retail experience.”

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With sales in excess of $6 trillion in 2019, the retail industry is one of the most important segments of the economy in the United States. The impact of COVID-19 has been devastating to the retail industry, resulting in most retailers having to close their stores and furlough or lay off their employees. Many retail analysts and economists are asking is what's next for retail.
What Customers Want
Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, makes the argument that certain things in retail will never change. For example, customers will always want low prices, fast delivery and a vast selection of products to buy from. The success of Amazon proves that Bezos knows what he's talking about. However, I predict that Amazon and other major online retailers will soon run into the same issue: the limits of technology.

Fast delivery is achieved by utilizing different methods for transporting a product. For example, Amazon's goal is to introduce the use of drones to speed up deliveries to customers. For argument's sake, let's say that in 2021, Amazon has unrestricted ability to use as many drones as it wishes. Will the speed of deliveries increase? Yes. However, the more important question might be: What's next? What will Amazon and other big retail companies introduce in 2022 or 2025 to increase the speed of deliveries? Unless they can find a transportation solution that is faster than using drones, they most likely will not be able to increase speed past a certain point.

The same example can be used for increasing the assortment of products offered for sale on a retailer's platform. It's conceivable that a retailer could list one billion individual products for sale on its website. However, can it list 1.5 billion? What about 2 billion, and so on? At some point, e-commerce organizations will discover that they could offer all available products, but continuing to add products does little to add value to the customer and, in my experience, only increases costs and complexity.

With a background in design thinking and reimagining how we bring retail products to market, I know how important it is to continually question what the consumer will want out of a retailer. I expect that in a few years, retail executives will be faced with the reality that there is not much more that they can do to increase value to customers through speed or assortment.
Virtual Retail: The Next Big Thing
COVID-19 is arguably one of the most disruptive events ever to impact the retail industry. Thousands of retail stores remain closed, and millions of retail workers have been furloughed or laid off. Grocery retailers continue to suffer a shortage of products, resulting in bare shelves.

The current climate also having an impact on consumer behavior. Instead of wanting to shop inside a store or visit a mall (behaviors that were already decreasing prior to the pandemic), consumers are embracing shopping online at home. Grocery retailers have experienced double-digit increases in demand for online grocery ordering and delivery, for example.

This crisis' impact on the retail industry could be severe, with many large and small retailers going out of business due to the lack of customers in their stores. What will remain is a new normal that creates possibilities for a new model for shopping and opportunities for new retail entrants to compete against bigger retailers.

What I envision is that consumers will trade speed for convenience and a shopping experience they can enjoy from the comfort of their own home. Under the surface, however, I believe consumers will still want to shop in a store, or at least they will want the feeling of shopping in-store. Consumers will want to roam aisles. They will want to seek out bargains and pick up and examine products off a shelf. Price and assortment will also remain important to consumers.

But if consumers eschew physical retail stores, won't that eliminate any possibility of creating a model whereby customers shop inside a store? No. And here's why.

I believe that the next big thing in retail will be the use of virtual reality (VR) to give consumers the opportunity to virtually shop from the comfort of their home, while providing them with an ultra-realistic retail experience.

In tests that I have been involved in related to this topic, I have been amazed at how realistic shopping inside a virtual store is and can understand why consumers will likely embrace the technology. Do you want to shop for jewelry and see how a bracelet, necklace, ring or watch will look? VR can provide the experience. Are you interested in shopping for groceries but want to roam specific aisles looking for deals? VR can provide the experience. Are you interested in shopping for shoes and apparel but want to try on dozens of outfits and shoes? VR can provide the experience.

For example, Facebook owns the VR company Oculus, which has the potential to create an integrated VR and social media shopping experience. Google has an extensive VR capability and could invest in a virtual shopping experience for customers.

The challenge that Facebook, Google, Apple or any other company that enters the VR shopping space will encounter is the lack of fulfillment capabilities. A plausible solution, due to the cash piles and high stock prices of the companies I mentioned, is that these organizations could look to acquire shipping companies such as FedEx.

What I find most interesting about this topic is that it opens the door for companies that don't currently have a large presence in retail to create a new retail model and disrupt the status quo of Amazon, Walmart and other large retail leaders.

What's the future of retail? I believe its virtual reality. If VR retail becomes a reality, retail executives are going to have to answer this question: What do we do now?

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Council Post: Is Virtual Shopping The Future Of Retail?

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With sales in excess of $6 trillion in 2019, the retail industry is one of the most important segments of the economy in the United States. The impact of COVID-19 has been devastating to the retail industry, resulting in most retailers having to close their stores and furlough or lay off their employees.

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During a quick trial, the experience worked smoothly with a basic, mind map-style interface.

Instead of having hand controllers, users select items using only sight.

Items can be added to the basket in the same fashion, but to check out, users have to take off the headset and return to the eBay app to put through the payment.

= bad (I developed user experience )

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Virtual reality could be the next big thing after the mobile shopping boom, and the brands want in.

Not just for gaming, the technology could also support retail and browsing experiences, and eBay is one of the first companies to take the leap.

Partnering with Australian retailer Myer, eBay launched what it called the world's first virtual reality department store Wednesday. Shoppers can now look through thousands of Myer products without leaving home.

Once the iOS or Android eBay Virtual Reality Department Store app is downloaded, it works with headsets like Samsung's Gear VR. eBay and Myer are also offering 20,000 free "shopticals" - basically just Google Cardboard headsets - to shoppers.

During a quick trial, the experience worked smoothly with a basic, mind map-style interface.

When you enter the virtual store, several categories of retail items are shown: women's clothing, electronics and others. Users select areas of interest, and the experience is built around the choices. As you move through, selecting or rejecting items, the store's algorithm should further adapt to what it thinks users might like.

If you want to take a closer look at a watch or bra, 100 of the top products are viewable in 3D, with the remaining 12,500 in 2D.

Instead of having hand controllers, users select items using only sight. The company has created "eBay Sight Search," which allows items to be chosen by holding your gaze on them for a number of seconds.

Items can be added to the basket in the same fashion, but to check out, users have to take off the headset and return to the eBay app to put through the payment.

The development team chose to develop Sight Search so users could move quickly through the virtual store, Steve Brennen, senior director of marketing and retail innovation at eBay, told Mashable Australia.

"Your eyes can move so quickly," he said. " It became pretty obvious. Sight Search in a VR world of retail feels very sensible. How much customers use it, do they love it, is where we'll get to next."

"Sight Search in a VR world of retail feels very sensible. How much customers use it, do they love it, is where we'll get to next."

Rather than sitting on the project, he explained the company decided to launch early. Through use, it will offer both retailers plenty of insight into how shopping works and what customers want.

Particularly, it will give them hereto impossible to collect data about what catches the shopper's eye and how they browse.

"Does virtual reality mean you will shop for longer - will customers browse for longer?" Brennen asked in his remarks at the launch party Tuesday. "Will the conversion rate for online sales increase in this environment? Will the return rate for retailers slow down?"

Obviously, there's plenty to work on: Leaving the app to checkout is a particularly awkward feature.

Building seamless transactions into the product is the obvious next step, Brennen said. "How do you browse, select and buy? That should be done in a virtual world," he said. "At the moment, we've got it to the point where you can select, add it your cart, and then you're thrown to the eBay app to check out."

Social shopping is also something they're thinking about - being able to bring your best friend or mum into the experience.

"Is this the next future of the retail experience? We're kind of believing now that it could be," he added.

For the moment, it's unclear whether customers want to shop in virtual reality and whether they'll treat this as more than just a gimmick.

If they do, and as the technology improves, retailers could get too good at selling you items you don't need. Think about that as you strap on your so-called "shopticals."
Have something to add to this story? Share it in the comments.

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eBay launches a world-first virtual reality department store

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Virtual reality could be the next big thing after the mobile shopping boom, and the brands want in. Not just for gaming, the technology could also support retail and browsing experiences, and eBay is one of the first companies to take the leap.

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In 2019 Forbes journalist Naveen Joshi had posted an article.   In the next 6 years  the global market of VR and AR in retail will reach 1.6  billion dollars market worth

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The global market for VR and AR in retail will reach USD 1.6 billion by 2025. With such a huge potential market, retail businesses must look forward to adopting these technologies. The demand here will be substantial in the future as implementation of these technologies enables businesses to grow and increase financial prospects. Implementation of AR and VR in retail helps retailers and consumers alike have a better shopping experience while reducing operating costs for retailers, and offering an immersive, engaging experience to consumers.
Benefits of using AR and VR in retail
Augmented reality and virtual reality solutions vastly improve customer engagement and involvement. Augmented reality can help provide customers in-store navigation and help them find the products they are looking for, easily. Virtual reality takes customer engagement to a whole new level by providing customers with virtual tours of the store from the comfort of their homes. Customers can get detailed information by looking at the product as they would in a store using virtual and augmented reality technologies. Augmented reality can be leveraged to project the products in the real-world, whereas virtual reality headsets can provide an immersive buying experience. This changes the way we look for, buy, and sell things online entirely. As a result, the e-retail segment will profoundly benefit from virtual and augmented reality technologies.

Create a personalized shopping experience

Retailers already realize the benefits of personalized and targeted marketing. They use personalized marketing strategies for mobile, desktop, and web shopping platforms. AR and VR can capitalize on this marketing strategy to provide a better shopping experience to customers. Retailers can provide 3D graphic-rich content instead of a simple 2D banner. This provides for an immersive experience and increases user engagement. This may result in the increase in sales for the retailers. Users, too, can design customized products specific to their liking using AR tools. This helps in creating a completely customized shopping experience where every customer has special and unique products, which increases the users' buy-rate from the retail store. Augmented and virtual reality gives a much detailed view of the customers' preferences and helps retailers provide curated shopping options to its customers.

Improve customer satisfaction and customer return rate

A happy customer is a returning customer. Customers are more likely to return to the retailer in the future if they have a pleasant experience while shopping for the first time with a particular retailer. With the personalized services provided by AR and VR technologies, the chances of the user having a positive experience are very high. The customer is likely to return to the same retailer for shopping in the future. The chances of product returns are also very low. VR and AR in retail will help companies retain their customers and achieve profits even in a highly competitive market. Early implementers will have the edge over other businesses who venture late into the augmented and virtual reality segment.

Augmented reality and virtual reality can prove to be excellent tools for marketing. They provide engaging and intuitive content for digital marketing. Augmented and virtual reality technologies can be used for marketing on social media sites. The current marketing strategies provide only information about products to the user. The ads displayed are non-interactive and don't always spark a user's interest. Augmented and virtual reality can provide for an engaging advertisement option that evokes interest in the user, making them more likely to check out the product. The social media marketing landscape is being used extensively by many companies nowadays, and retailers can benefit from it too.

Training employees is a complicated process. This exercise can prove costly if the employee makes some mistakes during the training process resulting in a financial loss for the employer. The use of VR and AR in retail can minimize the risk involved in the training procedure. Using Virtual Reality technology, employees can be trained by simulating real-life environments and situations. Employees can be safely trained, while reacting to various situations like helping customers find a particular product or operating a conveyor belt.
Applications of VR and AR in retail
According to a report, nearly two-thirds (61%) of the 1,000 U.S adults surveyed said that augmented reality has influenced where they shop. With spatial awareness of augmented reality, furniture retailers can leverage the technology to help customers find the right furniture according to their apartment space. The user can project the exact size of the furniture and get a better idea as to how the furniture will look when placed in a particular place or if it fits at all. Shoppers can easily gauge the color and style of the furniture selected and decide whether to go ahead with the purchase. Major retailers like Ikea and Amazon have already provided augmented reality-assisted buying options for their consumers. Many other companies are picking up on this technology to provide better service to their consumers.

Augmented Reality provides for a 'try-before-you-buy' option for consumers. It is common while shopping in the beauty industry for consumers, mostly women, to try a variety of products before deciding on one. With augmented reality, users can 'try' hundreds of beauty products and decide according to their choice. Consumers can try these products at the comfort of their fingertips. It helps to save time as they are no longer needed to visit an outlet in person. Retailers, too, can benefit from this and provide users with discounts and cashback as selling products on a digital platform is usually cheaper than from a brick-and-mortar outlet.

As with the beauty sector, the fashion and footwear sectors also have a 'try-and-buy' approach. AR can bring the process of fitting clothes and trying out new styles to homes. It will vastly increase the variety of options available to the consumer. Retailers can also provide the user with a wide variety of options online, but they are usually constrained with space in a physical outlet and offer fewer options for consumers to choose from. The shopping experience for the buyer is also greatly improved as they don't have to go through the task of changing into different clothes to try them on which may get tiresome after some time. Same as with the beauty sector, retailers can provide discounts to users using digital shopping methods while retaining their profit margins.
The future of VR and AR in retail
Augmented and Virtual Reality has already made inroads in the retail sector. Considering the benefits and ease of trade they offer, these technologies are here to stay. Major retailers across various sectors have already begun reaping the benefits of augmented reality and virtual reality technologies. The positive response of the consumers regarding these technologies will only push the industry to adopt them at their organizations more aggressively. The data generated from the technologies will help study customers' buying patterns and preferences to provide an improved experience to the retailer as well as the consumer.

The implementation of AR and VR in retail offers new methods the industry can operate on. Both these technologies are extending and expanding on traditional services offered by the retail industry. The future of retail deeply involves technology and AR and VR are going to play a huge role in this services industry.

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Retailers Have A Lot To Gain From AR and VR

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The retail industry has seen a paradigm shift in the last few years. The industry is turning to digital methods and technologies to carry out its daily operations. The use of technologies like VR and AR in retail is helping retailers adapt well to changes in the industry.