Hi there!
It has been a while since you have heard about our project. We all been really busy with our own schools and with our Demola project.
But finally we can say that our project is done and it's been quite a journey!
Yesterday we had our Final Pitching event and it went great, more about that on the next post.
I wanted first to go through what we have accomplished during these almost five months.
We were
given a task to develop a system to measure person’s strategic measurements
with a mobile phone camera. This was a tall task and we dove right into it full
of gusto.
We did a
lot of research and found out a lot about the problem domain and market, which
is huge.
Just the
yearly online apparel market is hundreds of millions of dollars and there is a
great need for these kind of solutions as they can potentially save a lot of
work for the customer and businesses.
We found a few problems
We found
that it’s possible to measure a person very precisely even with a normal camera,
and there’s a lot of measuring technology developed to measure people, like
full body scanners.
And here’s
the but: The problems is that scanners are expensive, and mobile phone cameras
or webcams are not very good tools for this because they have a very distortive
lens geometry and they don’t let a lot of light trough which causes a very bad
image quality in indoor conditions.
Also most
image based measurement systems either rely on multiple cameras for 3D vision
and lot of the aspects of the scene are constrained, like the space is know,
there’s predefined markings in the room for the camera to detect or the subject
to stand on and the camera is calibrated to remove the lens distortion.
And then we came up with new ideas
So we
started thinking, what is our competition doing and what’s actually the easiest
way we can do this?
We found
out that there’s great and simple solutions in the market already.
Like just
measure your existing clothing, for example your favourite dress shirt that you
know fits well, and save the measurements of that in a web app, that will give
you the closest match from the online store.
Or just
select a piece of clothing and size from another brand that you own and the
system will select a closest match based on that.
So we
forgot the complex image based measuring system and took a more simple approach
to the problem, after which we soon found out that, it was the exact same thing
our competition had done.
Benefits
But we also
realised that the competing approaches were lacking something.
They were
pretty much standalone apps not very visible on the web sites.
So we
decided on very universal approach that should be easy to use and very visible
for the user.
It should
also have some sort of hook, which we realised is a ability to make a profile
and store a history and an online wardrobe which is available to be used
anywhere online. A sort of portal to right size and kind of clothing.
Just the
kind you want, which you never need to return again.
Text is copied from our pitch sketch so you can have a little preview how our pitch was like.
Till the next time! :)
- Linda -
