Three Neiman Marcus stores — in San Francisco, Walnut Creek, and Dallas — have a special kind of mirror that lets people “try on” and compare different garments or outfits without actually trying them on.
The mirror, called the MemoryMirror, is made by a small Palo Alto company called Memomi. The company was demonstrating its mirror at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco Wednesday.
When you stand in front of the mirror, which looks to stand about six feet tall, you are captured by an Intel RealSense camera at the top. But the image you see in the mirror is straight-on, not the view from the camera’s perspective (like a security camera view). In fact, the mirror uses three other cameras and a patented image adjustment technology to make it look like the you’re looking into a real mirror.
MemoryMirror’s main trick, though, is showing you your digital image and then digitally outfitting you with different colors and styles of clothing. You can see various garments from all angles as you spin around in front of the camera.
The mirror records the video. The video quality isn’t quite good enough to see the detailed texture of the garment fabric, but it’s good enough to give you the general idea of how you’d look.
So a shopper in a Neiman Marcus store might try on a couple of garments in the store, then receive a link that they can use to watch the try-on session at home later. They might also be able to look at more color and style options that might be available at the Neiman Marcus online store.
CTO Ofer Saban told me that his company is also working on building the mirroring technology into a pane of glass. The glass might be used in a storefront window so that people could step up on the sidewalk and try on clothing.
It’s a very interesting way of converging the (traditionally) offline clothing shopping experience and the increasingly important online and mobile shopping experience.
