Towards a Next Generation Universally Accessible ‘Online Shopping-for-Apparel’ System

Abstract

This paper reports initial research findings from ongoing longitudinal participatory design studies within a national (Danish) funded project to realize a gesture-controlled 'Online shopping-for-apparel' system-A Virtual Dressing Room (VDR). A product that reduces customer purchase returns, reportedly up to 40%, which is a huge burden to the clothing industries as shopping percentile of sales online continues to increase, is targeted. Three studies are reported where results cumulate to highlight the need for continued research to realize a next-generation system to improve the user experience of online shopping for apparel where conclusions point to the need for adaptive user interface improvements. Unforeseen was that wheelchair-bound public especially responded positively to the potentials for the concept due to their limited mobility in shopping and this accessibility aspect can be a significant future market.

The Virtual Caliper: Rapid Creation of Metrically Accurate Avatars from 3D Measurements

“…Clothing applications & Virtual Try-on. Kristensen et al [37] discuss next generation on-line shopping apparel requirements and report that an estimated 15-40% of apparel purchased on-line is returned because the clothing does not not fit or look right. A virtual and metrically accurate avatar for trying-on clothes before purchase could play an important role in reducing these costly returns/exchanges.…”

“…Creating realistic full-body 3D avatars is important for many applications such as virtual clothing try-on [37], ergonomics [11,33] medicine [36,47], telepresence [24,39] and gaming. While there has been extensive research and there are many commercial systems for facial avatar creation, the full body has received less attention.…”

Towards an inclusive virtual dressing room for wheelchair-bound customers

“…In the clothing industry, such high volume of returned apparel is economically disastrous and it is in respect of this problem that the project is directed as pointed out herein. [see also 6,7,8] …”

“…Participants were predominantly Danish and it was evident in demographic analysis that answers were specific to online purchasing of apparel and predicted benefit of end-users. The personas generated from the surveys' demographic influences are published in [6].…”

“…Furthermore, observations of consumer shopping behavior was conducted in combinations with focus group interviews with females 18-35 years of age (n=7), expert interviews (sales staff) (n=3), and document analysis (magazines, shopping forums, statistics, industry reports) [6].…”