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Alberto Sanchez Lozano
The Rey Juan Carlos University (URJC) was the starting point in 2017 of a revolutionary project in the world of the textile industry. URJC professors and researchers Miguel Ángel Otaduy, Jorge López, Eder Miguel and Gabriel Cirio discovered the possibility of improving technology and digitization in this sector, and after a year and a half of hard work their research is beginning to bear fruit.
Although at first, their business idea was oriented to the world of cinema, their inquiries allowed them to observe the opportunities offered by the textile sector to implement digital solutions. Thus, they founded the 'Startup' Desólica, now known as Seddi Labs, in 2017.
Their products are not yet on the market but they can already boast of having worked with brands that are among the 10 most important in the world of fashion, having six patents already filed, plus two others in development, obtaining the financial support of important North American investors, establish an international structure with offices in the United States, Canada and Spain and, finally, already have a staff of more than 50 employees, including 12 doctors and former professionals from brands such as Ralph Lauren or Disney.
The real challenge they faced was to achieve a standard that would automate the creation of virtual copies of the garments they made. The company has developed a very complete technological base, in which they have also had to manufacture the necessary machinery to generate these hyper-realistic versions of the clothes that the big brands will sell in their stores in the future.
From that idea, the next developments of the company have been generated, which will see the light in 2020. Before they are available on the market, the 'Startup' has successfully tested its ideas and projects with large companies and major manufacturers in the fashion sector. Among his projects is a textile simulator with an extreme level of detail. “It allows to obtain a digital duplicate of the garment. Not even in the cinema do they have this level of realism”, assure the founders of the company.
Extreme level of realism
This simulator starts with a physical sample of the fabric, which is placed in a photonic machine developed by the Seddi Labs team, which studies and analyzes the reactions of the textile to light down to the smallest detail. Even "the loose hairs" and their shape. “You need to go down to this level of realism to create a realistic duplicate,” says Jorge López, CEO of Seddi Labs.
This technology reproduces the whole, not just the combination of threads with each other. For this it is necessary to also analyze the composition of the threads and patterns. "The appearance of a garment is not given solely by the mechanical properties of the threads, but by the interactions between them", they comment from the 'Startup'.
All this process and the collection of information is later transformed into hyper-realistic models at wire scales. With this model and together with 'deep learning' techniques, an attempt is made to predict how the fabrics will behave when they are turned, rubbed, illuminated, stretched or wrinkled. This advance allows a great improvement in terms of decision-making at the business level and the production of garments. In this way, the manufacturer knows from what order the threads should be sewn to the fabric needed to make a garment.
The following solutions that they have devised for the world of fashion are software for the design and manufacture of garments in the cloud, which allows collaborative work between different users to design clothes, and an app that will act as a "virtual fitting room" and allow the reconstruction of human bodies with clothes. This last idea works through a video, barely two seconds long, in which the only thing necessary is to wear tight clothes. With this, the app builds the body in 3D technology, aided by a very extensive database with numerous records and by its artificial intelligence algorithms.
The end of this process is a mannequin with the exact measurements of the individual, which also behaves and deforms in the same way as the consumer's real body. A product that will be launched within two years. For now, while its star projects will have to wait until 2020 to see the light, Seddi Labs plans to launch a mobile application that will act as a size recommender in online clothing stores.