Shop From the Comfort of Your Living Room
To this end, we produced a large-scale prototype of a retail fashion-oriented website. Solving for the needs of retailers like Target, the Gap, H&M, and even Macy’s, Nordstrom, and Amazon. The site had a standard construction, familiar to most everybody, and built for both desktop and mobile browsing. Just one exception: all of the looks, each model, all were fully volumetric, meaning shoppers could see the look from all angles, zoom in to see something closer, and generally have an experience that was the next best thing to having the model being in the room right there with you.
Working with new technologies tends to attract creators looking to push the boundaries of what’s possible, to draw attention with novelty itself. The work of those artists is critical to establishing the boundaries of what’s possible, while also bringing attention to what’s new.
But the true potential success for volumetric video as a medium lay in scale—in productions where it’s possible to set up an assembly line and turn the crank. Fashion is a perfect example of that. In fashion, editorial scenarios are one-offs that set the dream of the collection, but retail scenarios are a completely different problem set.
The biggest issue retailers have involves returns, which approaches nearly 20% for e-commerce, costing hundreds of millions a year. Solutions that help show how clothing moves in action, fits on various body types, and lets you get close to the fabric can help drive returns down by giving a more complete picture of clothing in question.
Our website featured over 75 different looks, with over a dozen models, and customers could interact with each look in full 3D, on mobile, desktop, as well as VR and AR modes, all through the same site.
All looks were captured over a two-day shoot. As a proof point for larger scale productions that might feature hundreds of models and styles, the project demonstrated that volumetric is mature enough as a technology to do what retailers need, using tools they are already familiar with. Extending that out to hundreds (or thousands) of looks is just an issue of scheduling and clear art direction.
