I must be not visionary enough. When online shopping, I have rarely wished to see more of a product but rather missed more tactile engagements: are these clothes soft, thin or thick? Do these shoes fit my unusual shape feet? And so forth.
I feel this is the biggest opportunity : how will these clothes fit you.
Let me use my smartphone to register my body automatically(ios or android, they have enough sensors to map my body just with the camera and ML), then show me how this jean will fit me.
Of course one of the biggest issue would be that clothes have pretty large size variation (most of the fabrication is still done manually).
I don't quite follow. Are these suits for individual consumers to use when they need to order new clothes? Or is it the sort of thing you'd have if you owned a tailors shop and customers put it on for test fitting?
It seems like an expensive item to give away for free, so they must be pretty sure that they'll recoup their costs?
It's a suit that they're sending out for free to anyone (individual customers) who asks, so I imagine they're pretty confident about the confidence in sizing leading to increased sales.
Something like this is already being done for made-to-measure apparel, e.g. https://www.mtailor.com/ for men's clothes and https://www.topologyeyewear.com/ for glasses (also - does anyone know if there's a service like this for women's clothing?). I do wonder how they're determining scale - seems fairly simple if you have two focal lengths, but these services seem to support single-camera phones as well. Are they getting data from the accelerometer to see how much you move your phone when you move it around your body/face?
The main problem now seems to be fully automating clothing manufacturing - it would be pretty cool to be able to scan your body and have a machine print out perfectly fitting clothes, no human required.
Yeah... Probably. I suspect that they don't really have a clear idea for how this will "reimagine at-home shopping" in 5-10 years.
Online shopping has often been a mental goto for people trying to imagine how technology will change commerce. The 90s boom/bust was full of retailers, cargo-cult online versions of regular retailers. Amazon worked, but nothing else did. Even Amazon never made profits directly from retailing physical products.
In reality (post bust) the first big industry to really go online was travel, with hotels, flights and such going mostly online very fast. Even faster than software, interestingly.
I think it's a parallel to robots for automation. For automated hotels or whatnot, people generally imagine an atm-like check-in desk. Robot maid. Robot room service. Robot consierge.. Jetsons. In reality, the check-in is your phone, an extension of your non-existant travel agent. The robot maid might be a self cleaning bathroom, where the entire room "flushes". Room service is just-eat...
People use robots as mental place-holders, for tasks people will not do in the future. Sometimes they take it literally. They do the same with digital department stores, for ecommerce.
So.. I dunno. I doubt Walmart will be the thing that's revolutionised early by ar/vr. Maybe a vr view of a model wearing something would be good, but I doubt it's important until the devices are ubiquitous. Ie, not a "killer app", which is what matters now.
For now, I think you'd get more mileage by developing the current generation of online stores. For example, have 3-4 models of different ages, shapes and sizes wear stuff. Use video for browsing. Use a Starbucks instead of a runway. ..way better/more content..use the technology people already have.
From my observation rather than first hand experience, buying dresses online is like playing roulette. The models bodies rarely match the customers, so how the dress will sit and flow is near impossible to tell. I have enough trouble buying dress shirts online!
Not sure how VR would solve this, non-VR 3D people models that could be customized in various dimensions, along with models of the dress and simulation of the fabric could improve the shopping experience.
VR is probably more applicable to buying items for the home, rather than clothes.
There have actually been a couple apps which tackle the simulate-trying-clothes-on problem, notably Avametric (https://www.avametric.com/). I remember the CEO showed me some of their generated models a few years ago and it seemed like very impressive technology.
VR (or AR) might be good for clothing purchases once accurate full body scanning and tracking is integrated. There is no commercial tech that does this with anywhere close to enough accuracy to be helpful though. Either its rough or expensive hacks (kinect, vive tracker) or expensive research only stuff like Microsoft Holoport.
Many/most online clothes retailers now include detailed measurements of their apparel. Buy a soft tailors measuring tape on Amazon for a few dollars and you can get very precise fits, actually much better than buying in person I find.
In addition, there's a huge focus now on material, both in the niche digital-only nerd-friendly companies like Outlier, Mission Workshop and Taylor and Stitch but in more mainstream companies like Banana Republic.
This acquisition reeks of some C level exec trying to play or at least attempting to play catch-up to the likes of Amazon and Google and other online major retailers.
I know a couple of people who work at Walmart R&D, and while I'm certainly no insider, I do know that they have had people working on VR/AR for at least a couple of years in a serious way.
The article says it's about shopping experience, but I would be surprised if they aren't also looking at warehouse logistics. Put the clipboard into a HUD, etc.
