Virtual mirror on the wall, who is the laziest shopper of them all?

If I could get to the International Consumer Electronics Exhibition in Berlin next week, I'd be heading straight for the virtual mirror, a product developed at the Fraunhofer Institute for Telecommunications, Heinrich-Hertz-Institut. It's not really a mirror and the only optics involved are in the camera and display, the main story here being the power of computing.

The scientists have come up with a way of making the task of trying on clothes an awful lot faster and simpler. Their virtual mirror is basically a large display, above which is mounted a camera which captures real-time images of the customer and displays them back to him on the screen. As the customer moves, so does his image on the screen.

The clever part is that the customer need only try on one particular garment, say a shirt, and the computer system can show that shirt in a different colour, with a different design or logo, or with a different texture. The system can even maintain this representation of a very different shirt to the one the customer is actually wearing, as the person moves around. Folds in the real shirt, for example, are mapped onto the virtual shirt shown on the screen.

As a lazy shopper myself, I'm quite taken with this new concept in clothes shopping. I'd take it one step further, however, dispensing with the fitting room and the entire store. Mine is a world in which I use a webcam above my computer monitor and use that screen as my virtual mirror, so that online stores can show me a variety of designs for any partricular clothes item. When I like what I see in the virtual mirror, I click it into my virtual shopping basket and then my 3D printer prints it off in virtually no time at all.

Source: Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft