The next step for digital fashion? AR glasses!
There is a lot of interest interest in digital fashion these days. The domain has taken some crucial steps and another big leap forward is about to happen soon. Rendering techniques have improved radically compared to the AR fashion from years ago and with the Non Fungible Tokens there’s now a valid payment system. But the real boost can be expected when consumer AR glasses will hit the market. Then, virtual fashion can finally be worn ‘for real’. Step by step, this article will describe the new world we’re entering, with some problems to fix, but with way more new and interesting opportunities to explore.
From creating to owning digital fashion
For most of us, the phenomenon of virtual fashion goes back to our early days with our first computers. In my case, a Commodore 64. Configuring your avatar, dressing it up with a nice shirt, that’s a common activity in a lot in game worlds. And it’s serious business nowadays, with people paying significant amounts of money for a unique piece of clothing when it’s temporarily available for sale in a world like Fortnite. Creating artificial scarcity works. Also beyond the game domain we’re seeing a surge of virtual fashion initiatives. Partially that’s because the quality level has grown beyond the techy look-and-feel of early AR experiments and proof-of-concepts. Tools to create virtual fashion have advanced rapidly. Thanks to powerful hardware realistic fabrics can be created. And with the arrival of 5G, there’s the possibility to use cloud rendering when a device reaches its processing power limits.
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That will be highly useful when viewing virtual outfits on a pair of AR glasses, because these devices will not be equipped with powerful hardware and fans to cool down the processor. They need to remain lightweight in order to have a chance to be publicly adopted as consumer gadgets. But for now, the AR devices on the market are still too heavy. And a major problem is their “FOV”.
When your augmented reality ends halfway your Field of Vision, the immersive experience of full-body clothing is still very conceptual. And with no options to actually wear and use AR fashion, demand has been minimal for a long time. Until recently. Thanks to the “Non Fungible Token” craze the exclusiveness of owning a creation can be the unique selling point. And when a piece cannot yet be presented properly with todays’ technology, it will manifest itself in the future. Some NFT don’t even contain the present day 3D files, because these might soon be outdated anyway when platforms are updated or enhanced with new features. An NFT related to an online garment can include a promise that an update or port to a new platform will happen when needed, making it a safe investment.
From owning to wearing AR fashion
Almost all of the big companies in Silicon Valley are working on AR glasses. Soon there be a way to actually wear our virtual garments ‘for real’. Until that time, we can have a peek into the future of AR fashion with our smartphones. We can have a look at our augmented self with a facefilter app. But what’s happening in Zoom and Teams sessions, when we’re occasionally seeing people appear covered up with virtual ornaments, that’s an even better preview of what’s ahead.
Facefilters will not just be the effects you use temporarily to record a funny clip. You’ll use them to express your semi-digital identity to others. Nowadays, when a session ends, it’s back to normal. But we’ll soon have an augmented appearance to be aware of 24/7. During the day might be changing our virtual outfits just like we’re swapping our Whatsapp icon for another one, to express how we’re feeling or what we’re doing. Or we might configure a number of outfits, specifying rules which one should appear when, where or depending on who we meet.
Although the scope of the facefilter technology seems a bit limited right now because most effects apply to ones’ head only, the AR effect apps are being updated with full-body tracking features. That means virtual fashion designs can come to life, which is giving the facefilter domain a push into a more relevant direction. There’s more to express when you’re not limited to just augmenting your face.
Currently, most AR effects are crazy, fun or totally over the top. We can’t imagine wearing those ‘for real’. But demand will lead to supply. The variety of AR filter effects will expand in two directions. One direction being a more subtle, serious, perhaps even functional way of enhancing ourselves. But the developments into the other direction will lead to content that’s even more experimental than what we’re seeing in the filter apps right now. People who have been in the DIY world of Second Life or readers of the novel Snow Crash know the kind of outfits people might show up with. The concept of a virtual clothing will gradually deviate more and more. We’re now still in the phase of trying to mimic reality with realistic fabrics, and the way these virtual ‘materials’ react on movement, physics and physical objects nearby. A gravity force should be down and a dress should somehow relate to the phenomenon dress as we know it, or else we get confused or lost. But we’re more accustomed to virtual appearances, designers can finally grab the unparalleled freedom that virtual fashion design offers. They can stop trying to resemble the physical genre of clothing. There’s no need for sleeves, or there can be 5 sleeves when the virtual garments never have to be manufactured for real, physically.
From wearing AR fashion to knowing what you wear
When you’ve been shopping for additions to your virtual outfit or if you’ve created something yourself, there will be a moment when you want to know how you look. In AR, you can not easily switch to a bird eye view to look at yourself, like you can in a game world. You can view a representation of your currently selected outfit either as a 3D rendering (1) in your Heads Up Display (HUD) or a replica AR avatar (2) representing you will pop up in front of you. But to know how your outfits fits you, a real physical mirror (4) will be the most genuine way of seeing our augmented self. With no mirror available, you could connect to a static camera (3) or the camera in the pair of AR glasses of a person in front of you. Which might even lead to interesting and surprising insights, because knowing how another person sees you, is not going to be straightforward.
From knowing what you wear to knowing how others see you
Within a couple of year we will be wearing AR glasses from different brands, with different software installed on it, connected to different AR ecosystems. In a game world, both you and an avatar in front of you are within the same rendering environment. You see yourself, you see the other avatar, and you know that the other person sees you in the way you see yourself. But in AR you’re not sure how you will appear in someone else’s augmented reality. Even if you’ve picked a default outfit, there’s no guarantee that you will appear in a similar way on someone elses glasses. Just like emoticons can vary from phone to phone.
From knowing how others see you to controlling what happens next
When your outfit isn’t a default one, digital files will need to be transmitted to another nearby device. If it’s a unique AR creation you own, you want your appearance to exist on the other device only temporarily. The files should be deleted when you’re out of sight again. But creators of digital garments can also turn that situation into an opportunity. By allowing the files to remain on the other device for a 30 day trail mode, eye to eye advertising will be the new mouth to mouth advertising.
If the other device or the software doesn’t have the proper security certificate or DRM system that handles a purchased NFT outfit properly, an AR fashion app might choose to send over a low-poly version of the outfit. But is that what you want, when you’ve spend a fortune on a unique and amazing AR appearance? And what if the opposite happens? If a person with a mediocre device or a bad connection attempts to view your AR outfit? Do you agree to appear in a basic or clumsy way? The glitch art community can expect to be busy, spotting outfit failures because of compatibility problems. Besides these accidental glitches, there will be the issue with people deliberately viewing another person in a different way. What will be the constraints we want to enforce there, and what if that’s extremely hard to enforce technically?
Controlling what we’ll see through our AR glasses will not be a very transparent domain, but a battlefield. If we’re lucky, our governments will play a leading and pro-active role. But most probably, at first there will be numerous AR metaverse companies and initiatives that will jump into the synchronization market, trying to become the major hub to connect to when your current AR appearance needs to be communicated to a person in front of you. Big Tech will join this battle too, once there’s enough money to make, possibly trying to vendor lock us into their AR worlds.
If our freedom to express ourselves is going to be a commercial domain not dominated by fashion brands but by Silicon Valley, it’s time to break free. In a few years time there might be a need for an ‘AR Glasses Jailbreaking Club’, so we can reclaim the freedom to view any app or 3D creation on our devices. And instead of ending up in anarchistic AR chaos, the NFT mechanism could help to make the step towards a commercially viable cross-platform AR ecosystem, independent from Big Tech. But that’s way more steps ahead of the first step we can expect to see soon: AR glasses that will bring digital fashion to life.
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