MEX

Fubiz just featured this fun short, in which a group of girls virtually “try on” dresses found on Google Images by projecting them onto each other. The video was made by Wieden + Kennedy Tokyo for a Google ad campaign.

For me, the video captures the fun, social aspect of real-life shopping, without the stigma of feeling limited in the number of styles you can try on, or being pressured to buy once you’ve tried something. Some premium fashion companies have been making inroads into projection and augmented reality, but the usage of these technologies is still to progress beyond a promotional tool for a limited audience. A recent conversation with the augmented retail specialists Holition revealed to us that the holy grail in online fashion retail is to reduce the proportion of items that are currently returned after purchase – which can be up to 50 percent for some stores. The practice of buying and returning is currently a fixture in the multi-billion pound fashion e-commerce market, at great cost to the retailers. Various technical solutions have been devised to address the problem, from mechanical mannequins to online dressing rooms and garment scanning techniques. These solutions all rely on a personal screen to view the outfit, but the addition of the projector takes the garment off the screen and into a social space. This could also be combined with developments in real time 3D scanning to allow the projection to dynamically follow the movement of the body.

Just a few ideas to get you thinking about possible uses for some of the technologies that are being crammed into handsets at the moment! What other roles might mobile devices play in fashion retail in the future? Let us know your thoughts below, or get in touch by email or twitter.