The project
Yahoo RYOT Lab teamed up with designer Rebecca Minkoff to bring her Spring/Summer 2021 collection into augmented reality. The result was one of the first high-fashion AR presentations of its kind — real garments, digitised and placed into the real world through a phone screen.
The challenge with clothing in AR is that fabric is hard. Photogrammetry handles rigid surfaces well. Soft, textured, light-catching material is a different problem entirely. Folds have to read correctly. Seams have to hold. The silhouette has to match the physical garment closely enough that someone trying it on virtually doesn’t feel like they’re wearing a bag.
My contribution
I handled the photogrammetry capture and post-processing for the clothing items — scanning each garment, cleaning the resulting meshes, and resolving the inevitable artefacts that come out of scanning soft materials: holes, noise, topology that needs reworking before it’s anywhere near real-time ready.
The goal was photorealism at AR scale. Close enough to the real thing that the experience felt like a genuine preview of the collection, not a tech demo.