There was a time when e-commerce seemed futuristic but today, online shopping is transforming the market. Fashion retailers, fashion brands and marketplaces for clothing are spending millions on product digitisation, photography and digital marketing to sell their products more efficiently and earn huge profits. With consumer and retailer data being fragmented, delivering desired customer experience remains a challenge. Better information allows retailers to consolidate product information across channels, enabling improved product discovery to catch the attention of buyers.
Vue.ai, an artificial intelligence (AI) startup of the retail industry, announced the commercial launch of the world’s first AI-based human model generator, VueModel, to solve this problem, in March 2018. It is a vertical of the company Mad (mind able devices) Street Den, founded by Ashwini Asokan and Anand Chandrasekaran in 2016. The company’s headquarters are located in Redwood City, California, while its office in India is in Chennai. It serves retailers in the US and the UK as well as in India, the Middle East and Latin America, who mostly work online.
As cutting edge as AI technology is, the process, on the contrary, is extremely user-friendly. One has to simply upload product images. AI analyses the image of the garment laid out on a flat surface that is provided to it and generates on-model fashion imagery, while also predicting how the garment would fit. Unlike pre-existing solutions in the industry, which use 3D body scanners that require special hardware, Vue.ai uses generative adversarial network (GAN), a class of machine learning systems that is extremely efficient when it comes to generating realistic images. Algorithms developed by its neuroscientists and image-recognition experts help AI generate different human body types and visualise the garment on the body. Once the image is generated, it can be downloaded and used as required.
