FINALLY! Project is done!

Hi there!

It has been a while since you have heard about our project. We all been really busy with our own schools and with our Demola project.

But finally we can say that our project is done and it's been quite a journey!
Yesterday we had our Final Pitching event and it went great, more about that on the next post.

I wanted first to go through what we have accomplished during these almost five months.

We were given a task to develop a system to measure person’s strategic measurements with a mobile phone camera. This was a tall task and we dove right into it full of gusto.

We did a lot of research and found out a lot about the problem domain and market, which is huge.

Just the yearly online apparel market is hundreds of millions of dollars and there is a great need for these kind of solutions as they can potentially save a lot of work for the customer and businesses.

We found a few problems

We found that it’s possible to measure a person very precisely even with a normal camera, and there’s a lot of measuring technology developed to measure people, like full body scanners.

And here’s the but: The problems is that scanners are expensive, and mobile phone cameras or webcams are not very good tools for this because they have a very distortive lens geometry and they don’t let a lot of light trough which causes a very bad image quality in indoor conditions.

Also most image based measurement systems either rely on multiple cameras for 3D vision and lot of the aspects of the scene are constrained, like the space is know, there’s predefined markings in the room for the camera to detect or the subject to stand on and the camera is calibrated to remove the lens distortion.

And then we came up with new ideas

So we started thinking, what is our competition doing and what’s actually the easiest way we can do this?

We found out that there’s great and simple solutions in the market already.

Like just measure your existing clothing, for example your favourite dress shirt that you know fits well, and save the measurements of that in a web app, that will give you the closest match from the online store.

Or just select a piece of clothing and size from another brand that you own and the system will select a closest match based on that.

So we forgot the complex image based measuring system and took a more simple approach to the problem, after which we soon found out that, it was the exact same thing our competition had done.

Benefits

But we also realised that the competing approaches were lacking something.

They were pretty much standalone apps not very visible on the web sites.

So we decided on very universal approach that should be easy to use and very visible for the user.

It should also have some sort of hook, which we realised is a ability to make a profile and store a history and an online wardrobe which is available to be used anywhere online. A sort of portal to right size and kind of clothing.

Just the kind you want, which you never need to return again.

Text is copied from our pitch sketch so you can have a little preview how our pitch was like. 

Till the next time! :)

- Linda -