Mickey Mouse Club & Virtual Clothes

Badge - thrifted | dress - c/o Chicwish | shirt - c/o OASAP | shoes - Asos. A large, obnoxious and entirely irrelevant badge is sometimes what is needed to put the finishing touches on an otherwise casual, 90s-inspired outfit. Mickey Mouse is looking pretty badass next to that graffitied wall... I want to jump right into some science today. Aside from 3D Printing, one technology that I am pretty excited about is augmented reality. Making computers "see" has been an insanely difficult task for computer scientists, nearly as difficult as making computers talk. The human visual system is incredibly complex - think about it, how does your brain recognize all those jumbles of lines, colours and shades as distinct objects, also taking into account your movement around those objects and the object's movement around you? You do it without even having to think about it, but as much as 30% of the brain is devoted to vision processing. Image source and article. But recently, computers have been learning to see a lot better. A group of scientists at the CSIRO have been working on technology that can accurately work out "landmarks" on people's faces in three-dimensions from a 2D video. This means a computer can recognise that a particular bunch of lines means lips, and that lips are separate from eyes, for example, from multiple angles. An application of this is placing virtual makeup, hats or glasses on people's faces. Has anyone tried on virtual glasses? Heaps of sunglasses stores use virtual try-on rooms for glasses now, though the only time that I've tried it out the glasses went all glitchy and buzzed somewhat frighteningly around my head. A very disappointing introduction to augmented reality. But now the technology is improving, these researchers envision that soon we will have virtual changing rooms (there have already been pretty decent attempts), where with a webcam or phone, you can try on clothing from online retailers in your own house to make sure they fit. Which is pretty damn cool. (Also, you can already do things like put virtual furniture into your house, which you can see demonstrated by an incredibly odd IKEA family.) Can't wait to do my first virtual reality outfit post... ;) Bloglovin' | Facebook | Twitter |  Instagram | Chictopia | Lookbook | Tumblr