Neon Fashion
Volumetric video is perfect for fashion scenarios, which range from editorial work that elevates a line or a look, to retail sales that showcase features of clothing with the direct goal of making a purchase happen. The opportunity to use virtual reality to craft virtual store fronts was perfect to showcase the potential for editorial fashion, so we built a three window, dynamic virtual window set, featuring six different looks from two models.
I was responsible for creative and stylistic direction of the project, managing both the onset, real-world deliverables, as well as managing the digital production effort.
Walking down the city streets of downtown San Francisco, I was struck by the storefront displays of fashion retailers and department stores. Visual merchandising uses creativity to drive customer interest (and sales).
Click here or on the image to launch the player.
While each link lacks the feature rich set of the full VR experience we built, and could certainly use additional optimization, these simple web players show a simple version that you can orbit and around and zoom in on.
There are a few different volumetric video solution providers out there, and in addition to building a scenario showcase that we could use to interact with potential clients, we used the opportunity to do two additional things that we could use as a differentiator in the market. To begin with, we took work as originally lit and completely re-lit and re-rendered the material to demonstrate the extensibility of our content (and to be able to walk others through similar work, step-by-step). We also took the opportunity to showcase the fidelity of our output with work that is slow and subtle.
This is somewhat counter-intuitive, but the simple truth is that most volumetric video providers hide the inherent flaws of output by showing captures constantly in motion (often fast motion). Still and slow content is hard to pull off without revealing flaws.
In the time since we built our store-front window demo, multiple fashion houses have used volumetric to bring their work to fans as both virtual and augmented reality experiences. Notably, Balenciaga used our volumetric solution with our licensee Dimension in the UK to showcase an entire fall collection as a multi-level 3D world for fans to explore via a remote rendered website that hosted the content.
H&M partnered with Simone Rocha for an AR pop-up book featuring Helena Bonham -Carter, showcasing a fashion collection, paired with prints by painter Faye Wei Wei.
Producing samples of scenarios like Neon Fashion helped to provide concrete examples for creators to use as a jumping off point for innovation. Work like this and the other prototype experiences my team built helped set the stage for others who followed, especially in the early days of the technology, when there were no samples that combined high quality output with an artistic point of view.