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Daria Efimova
The rise of new technologies reaches all sectors of our lives: including fashion. Over time, more and more projects appear that facilitate the purchase online for the user. This time, one of the works like this comes out of the Rey Juan Carlos University and is recognized internationally. “Learning-Based Animation of Clothing for Virtual Try-On” is the doctoral thesis of Igor Santesteban, co-supervised by professors Dan Casas and Miguel A. Otaduy, who has won the prize 2021 Retail Digital Transformation Grand Challenge. This year, the objective of this competition was to find a solution to the problem of "creating products in a virtual and collaborative way" in all their production cycles. Along with the URJC, a project from the University of Florence and the Vital Mechanics company have also won the award.
"Learning-Based Animation of Clothing for Virtual Try-On” consists of developing a virtual fitting room, in which buyers can see, thanks to 3D technology, how a given garment fits. This technology is becoming increasingly popular in the market thanks to the boom in online shopping, so it has great potential for the future. As Miguel A. Otaduy explains: “Right now, large companies, such as Amazon or Zalando, are investing in this. Sooner or later we will begin to see practical solutions, to be able to try on garments directly on the mobile, on avatars of ourselves.”
This work is the result of several years of research. It has been developed in collaboration with DESILICO/Seddi LABS, a technology and knowledge-based company (EBTC) of the URJC, and was published at the Eurographics 2019 and CVPR 2021 scientific conferences. For the Retail Digital Transformation Grand Challenge awards, the The creators of the project have focused on describing the impact that this technology can have on the fashion sector and online sales.
The researchers stress that they are very proud of the success of the project. "This award means confirmation that the research we are doing can have a very large practical impact," concludes Miguel A. Otaduy. In addition, this project will be presented at PI Apparel Europe 2022, a congress on technology for fashion.