Are Avatars The Future Of Shopping?

As retailers get more and more high-tech gadgets, like virtual reality headsets and location-aware beacons, the natural instinct is to throw them at customers and dazzle them with science. However, putting customers into a digital world might work better than trying to bombard them with it.

That, at least, is the thought process behind Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s (HPE) latest moonshot tech project, Forbes reported. In conjunction with German 3D scanning and printing firm DOOB, Hong Kong-based Quantum Matrix and South Korean digital clothing developer Physan, HPE has developed a process by which human bodies can be rendered into personalized avatars in the space of a few minutes. After that, the consumer’s digital self is free to do a host of activities that make sense in an eCommerce world: try on digital clothes, share looks with and solicit opinions from friends and tailor preferred items to individual measurements.

The technology is far from market-ready, though, as is evident from the process by which a consumer’s avatar is created. The user in question enters a closet-sized enclosure, within which 64 cameras scan for as many details as possible. Forbes said that the process takes “a few minutes,” which might make it more of a novelty in retail environments at its current state than a linchpin of getting customers to try on more items quickly.

The current failings of the technology haven’t stopped HPE from dreaming big, though. A representative told Forbes how the company hopes to improve upon the system to the point where consumers’ avatars are linked to workout regimens. That way, when someone gains or loses weight, the body-mapping system can immediately recommend products that might fit their new bodies or their lifestyles better.

All that needs to happen is for HPE to shrink its avatar machine to a manageable size and form, like computer engineers had to shrink ENIAC from half a gymnasium to pocket-sized phones.