No more would you have to drag an unwilling friend or spouse shopping in order to tell you that you look silly in the latest fashions! Simply stand on the scanning unit with a barcoded article of clothing, and then view a hologram of you wearing the item. It saves time (now you only need the dressing room to see if the clothes are comfortable), and you don't have to depend on a store clerk to tell you what you really look like in spandex.
Of course, men would be kept strictly away from the lingerie -- not only to prevent ogling the women, but to keep the image of some hairy middle-aged guy wearing a lacy nightie from causing nausea in innocent bystanders.-- mrouse, May 05 2002 Miralab http://miralabwww.unige.ch/This is very much their field of investigation. [Aristotle, May 07 2002, last modified Oct 04 2004] A body and garment creation method for an Internet based virtual fitting room http://miralabwww.u...al-camera-ready.pdfHere is how Miralab does what you are suggesting. [Aristotle, May 07 2002, last modified Oct 04 2004] I'm sure similar things have been proposed in the past. But it would be hard to simulate how the clothes would hang on a different person: it's not just a matter of mapping a bitmap onto the person's form. Even to check the leg length of trousers would be complex, depending on the drape of the fabric, which would in turn depend on the sort of fabric and the cut. And it wouldn't be able to simulate ugly ridges of fat bulging out from around the edges, which is the sort of thing some people really need to know.-- pottedstu, May 06 2002 You're right, scanning the body and figuring out how it interacts with clothing would be the hard part. They have those new airport scanners that supposedly see under clothing, which might work to see how your body "hangs" with clothes you find comfortable enough to wear in public. This idea probably wouldn't work for things you expect to alter your body's curves, like girdles and brassieres.-- mrouse, May 06 2002 Scanning the body is easy as long as you don't mind doing it in the nude. Cylindrical scanners already exist that you stand on in the nude and it does you a 360 degrees scan. The nudity is necessary because it is easier to add clothes rather than take them away.
A simpler version was open to the public in the Millenium Dome and this took four pictures of you and, with the help of an assistant, stuck them together. You did this with your clothes on so the resulting clones could not be used for clothes shopping.
The standard, baked approach is to select the attributes of an avatar that looks like you and see them on the avatar in combination. This is what www.boo.com did before they went bust. Miralab in Switzerland has also done a lot of work on fashion shows and how to hang clothes correctly from bodies.-- Aristotle, May 07 2002 Aristotle, landsend.com also uses an avatar system, "My Virtual Model." It works fairly well.-- waugsqueke, May 07 2002 Many stores now have scanners where you can grab a cd, dvd, or video tape off the shelves, scan the barcode, and listen/view a short excerpt from it. This is what made me think of the clothing version. The avatar model is more like choose the type of movie you want to see and then see a clip from it -- it's still useful (and you can do it from home), just different.-- mrouse, May 07 2002 Here is how you do it: Setup a camcorder with a nu-view sterioscopic adapter (3D) and connect a tivo unit (for delay in the video) and a crt tv (so the 3d will work) to it. Have the coustomers put the clothes that they are trying out on and stand on a rotating pad infront of the camcorder (or if you are too cheap for the pad have them spin around them selves) then they can see them selves on the TV screen in 3d (with special lcd shutter classes) to see if they like how they look.-- juz10mac, Jun 13 2004 ^I ment to say glasses not classes... lcd shutter glasses-- juz10mac, Jun 13 2004 random, halfbakery