Stefan Pernar of Virtual Reality Ventures talks about his Virtual Reality Fashion show. He’s integrated the Marvelous Designer CAD program with Unity 3D, and created a pipeline so that designers could design fashion pieces and see how the fall and flow on a virtual model.
He and his partner Joel De Ross have also been able to create a lot of buzz for the potential of VR within the Marvelous Designer community, and get artists such as Android Jones interested in providing pieces to be shown in their demos.
Fashion is largely a 2D design process, but the rendering the objects in 3D and see how they’ll look and feel on a model of a specific size is something that is VR is very well suited for. Stefan will be targeting a consumer experience of allowing people to preview fashion before buying it, and there’s even a feature that shows how well the clothing fits on your body through a heatmap of where it’d be too tight or too loose.
Stefan is also looking to see how clothing manufacturers could start to use VR to allow retailers to pre-visualize products before they’re actually produced to help in the decision as to whether or not they’re interested in pre-ordering it.
If VR is going to go mainstream, then Stefan believes that VR needs to be seen as a viable business tool and so he’s a co-founder of the Australian Virtual Reality Industry Association. He hopes to connect businesses and developers and consumers together to see the potential of VR to help businesses.
Real estate previews with Matterport scans could enable clients to see 10 locations within an half hour that would be physically impossible to do due to how much time it takes to travel around physical spaces. Remote real estate inspections is also another important potential application.
He also sees that data visualization will also be a really big enterprise application. Try-before-you-buy tourism like Experience Japan will also be a big application.
Finally, he sees that we’re still waiting for the big killer VR app, and that he expects that the impact of VR will be larger impact on society than most people are expecting.
Reddit discussion here. Also be sure to check out Road to VR’s coverage of this fashion demo.
TOPICS
- 0:00 – Intro. Virtual Reality Ventures is a VR consultant, and is showing a VR fashion show.
- 0:43 – Virtual Reality pipeline. Integrated Marvelous Designer CAD program with Unity 3d
- 1:16 – Difference between 2D and fully immersive, 3D VR. Try on different sizes of virtual garnets and see where it’s a tight fit with
- 2:35 – Getting a photoscan into VR. Entering in measurement points
- 2:59 – Target market. Not penetrated consumer market, and so creating a point-of-sales experience. Collaborating Android Jones and other Marvelous Designer artists. More at http://www.virtualrealityventures.com.au/fashion
- 4:02 – Getting fashion design artists to collaborate. Joel De Ross has been evan
- 4:58 – Similar to 3D printing revolution. Connect design and artists directly to the customers without going through the manufacturing giants
- 5:45 – Where to get these fashion products actually produced
- 6:17 – Marvelous Designer is like blender where you define thickness of materials
- 6:40 – What is Marvelous Designer? Design tool to design and pre-visualize fashion. Make patterns and define how they’re put together. Define materials and textures and produces a natural fall and flow. Developed pipeline to integrate with Unity3D.
- 7:46 – Produce videos with virtual models.
- 8:19 – Designing things within a 3D space? Fashion is a 2D process. Putting it together creates the 3D shape.
- 9:17 – No real benefit to bring designing in 3D. It’s more about seeing what it looks like in 3D.
- 9:51 – Physics models of how materials works comes from Marvelous Designer
- 10:11 – Better than looking at 2D cloth, and likely not 100% accurate, but good enough. Could be used for visualizing products before they produced so that they can be pre-ordered
- 11:23 – How’s the response to fashion at SVVR? Trying to make VR as a business tool. It’ll make it more mainstream.
- 12:25 – Co-founder of the Australian Virtual Reality Industry Association. Tie businesses and developers and consumers together. Help start various meet-ups. Lots of potentials for real estate. Going to speak about VR to a CIO Summit. What would you show a CIO about business applications of VR? Matterport scan of the expo. Consulting people on VR strategy and for remote inspections for real estate.
- 15:15 – Business applications of data visualization and enterprise software. Potentially network visualization tool for Oculus Rift. Humans are not designed to see data in spreadsheets.
- 16:28 – Huge impact on society. Try-before-you-buy tourism like Experience Japan. No killer VR app yet, but most people are underestimating how huge VR will be.
Theme music: “Fatality” by Tigoolio
Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.452] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast.
[00:00:11.977] Stefan Pernar: My name is Stefan Perner. I'm from Virtual Reality Ventures coming from Australia. We are focusing as a company specifically on virtual reality related development and services and consulting. And today we are showing specifically virtual reality fashion. So what we have done is we are working with one of Australia's top independent retailers That's Brett Partington from Sydney Street in Adelaide. He challenged me to come up with a virtual reality fashion show, and I was researching how that could possibly be done. So we came up with a pipeline, we have implemented it, and we are showing it today.
[00:00:42.464] Kent Bye: So what is part of this virtual reality fashion pipeline that you had to create then?
[00:00:47.035] Stefan Pernar: Well, a lot of you probably have seen The Great Gatsby. It's a fantastic movie with Leonardo DiCaprio. They have won an Oscar for best costume design. And they have actually used the same software that we have integrated with Unity 3D, which is called Marvelous Designer. So it's basically a CAD, C-A-D software for fashion design. You define the pieces in the software, you define the seams, how they all fit together, and then it's draped over a digital avatar. And you can use the same patterns to give it to a tailor to create the actual garments.
[00:01:15.874] Kent Bye: Wow, OK, so I can sort of start to see how being in virtual reality and designing these can be a lot better. Maybe you could talk about that integration with doing it from a 2D versus doing a fully immersive 3D version of that.
[00:01:27.905] Stefan Pernar: The fully immersive 3D version is just different. I mean, everybody who's tried VR knows that 3D is not VR. I mean, VR is kind of 3D, but there's so much more to it. And the benefit is that in VR, when you have a virtual reality fashion show, the avatar can be modeled based on your shape, your size, and your height, and all these things. And then you actually see how the garments would fit on you. The problem with fashion, I'm learning that myself at the moment because I don't have a fashion background. I have a background in corporate IT. A size eight is not necessarily a size eight. I'm talking about ladies sizes now, right? One garment fits you in size eight and another garment might fit you in size 10. But when you actually take the patterns that you would give to a tailor, then you would have the exact sizes. So we wouldn't have to talk about sizes anymore. You just put on the virtual garments on your avatar, maybe on a 3D scanned version of your body. And then you would apply, we can apply actually a heat map that shows us where there would be a tight fit or where it's too loose. So if it's too tight, it would be red showing up in the texture of the garment. And when it's too loose, it would be blue, for example. And if it is a good fit, it would be green. And then that way, we can animate that. And you can see, OK, when you bend over or when you walk that way, for example, then you can see, ah, that would not fit very well. And then you can choose a larger size.
[00:02:34.968] Kent Bye: And so how do you foresee people getting their photo scanned or Kinect scanned avatar into your system?
[00:02:42.173] Stefan Pernar: Well, we have somebody here who is working with us on scanning people right at the moment. It's Scott Phillips from The Robots Are Coming. And he is using a Kinect-based system. But we don't have to do it too complex, you know. We can just have a couple measurement points and then put the height in and that would be already a step into the right direction.
[00:02:59.690] Kent Bye: I see. And so what is the target market for this specific application? Is it actual costume designers or you see it as kind of a widespread consumer base at first?
[00:03:08.677] Stefan Pernar: Well at the moment the Rift hasn't really penetrated a whole lot of the consumer market. So what we are targeting at the moment is really creating an experience for the customer. For example at a point of sales location or in a high throughput area like a mall or something like this where we would have a custom fashion show created and set up. We would have a Rift or two there and then people can put it on and and just get a bit of an experience and say, oh, this is so cool. This brand is using this cutting-edge technology. At the moment, we are collaborating with a bunch of artists, which are some of the world's top digital artists, like Android Jones and Max Pressman, et cetera, who have actually been inspired by our projects to contribute their art to it. And we are working with Adrian. Adrian is a marvelous designer expert, and he has just won the 39th Monthly Marvelous Designer Competition. So he has created the garments for us. and you can have a look at yourself at vrv.com.au slash fashion and download it yourself and get a bit of an idea of what we're doing.
[00:04:02.367] Kent Bye: And so how did you get an artist like Android Jones to be inspired with what you're doing?
[00:04:07.590] Stefan Pernar: Well, that is really something where the product has taken on a life of its own. I obviously am more of a technology background, but when I introduced this concept to one of my fellow meetup participants down there in Melbourne, Joel DeRoss, right? He was out of his mind for Joel because he has given up his true passion, which is fashion, for music 15 years ago because he couldn't afford to bring his designs into the physical space. But when you're not limited in that way, when you don't have this high cost of entry, then all you have to be is really creative and you spend the time putting the garments together. Everybody can spend the time designing the patterns, putting it all together. and he has communicated this vision to the Marvelous Designer crowd on their forum and we have garnered the interest of a global arts collective at this point and it's just phenomenal.
[00:04:57.946] Kent Bye: Yeah, I guess what I'm hearing is sort of with the 3D printing revolution in terms of, you know, being able to put a 3D model and get out, you know, using some sort of plastic substance, you know, get these little figurines out. But it sounds like what you're working on is sort of the equivalent, but for the fashion world to be able to take in and generate these fashion pieces and then create a template to be able to send to someone to actually put it all together is what I'm hearing.
[00:05:21.844] Stefan Pernar: Kent, you're hitting the nail on the head because we want to leverage the maker movement. We want to connect the designers and the artists directly with the customers. With the consumers, make the patterns available to whoever wants to implement them and customize them for the people who want to wear them, and then we don't have to go through the big corporate machine of the textile clothing and footwear industry to get cutting-edge designs out to people who really want it.
[00:05:44.799] Kent Bye: Now, where is the manufacturing process? Like, if I had a template for a jacket I wanted to make, where would I send it?
[00:05:51.303] Stefan Pernar: Well, this is something that we have to develop going forward a bit more. We have just finished our proof of concept and imported three garments in the demo that I just described at vrv.com.au. But we have altogether ten garments at the moment with designs from these great digital artists and as a next step we will be releasing a prototype in July that will create a much higher production value experience for people who want to have a look at it and then we are aiming for a kickstarter possibly in July.
[00:06:17.430] Kent Bye: I see. And so how do you import different fabrics and textures? I mean, do you have the library of anything?
[00:06:23.955] Stefan Pernar: Now, I'm not a Marvelous Designer expert myself, so you probably have to talk to them a bit more. But it is just like Blender, for example, where you can define the thickness of the material, how it responds physically, et cetera. It's pretty cool. I mean, look up Marvelous Designer and the stuff that they're doing there. And yeah, it's just pretty amazing.
[00:06:40.569] Kent Bye: Yeah, and this is the first I've ever heard of Marvelous Designer. So maybe you could just sort of describe to me, what is Marvelous Designer?
[00:06:46.688] Stefan Pernar: Well Marvelous Designer is basically a specialized fashion design tool like Gerber and Lectra and these are industry specific design tools that are being used to design and pre-visualize fashion. The way it works is you buy a license of the software, a student license I think is $25 per month, the professional license is a bit more expensive, I don't have it on top of my head at the moment. But then what you do is you basically would create the patterns using computer-aided design tools, CAD tools. You would define where the pieces fit together, so how they would be sewn together, and then you arrange it roughly around the digital avatar, the digital mannequin, and then you basically stitch it together. It's all based on pressing the button. You define the materials, you define the textures that you want to use in it, and then it creates a natural fall and flow of the garment, how it would look on an actual mannequin or an actual person. And then you can animate the whole process and you can export it into a point cache and all these kind of things. And what we have done is we have developed a pipeline so that it can work with Unity 3D.
[00:07:46.030] Kent Bye: I see and so then can you output like a video to an embedded web application on a website then of this someone walking down a runway a virtual model with the garment and it's sort of flowing how it would actually look?
[00:07:58.255] Stefan Pernar: Absolutely and that is exactly what we're doing so the proof of concept that we have published at our website actually demonstrates this as a proof of concept but you basically press a button one two or three which kind of garment or what garment you want to get demonstrate and we obviously have to work on the user interface there
[00:08:13.000] Kent Bye: But then the model walks out wearing that particular garment and it flows and falls naturally physically accurately stimulated And so it sounds like you know you're designing this in the CAD program putting it into the virtual reality And do you foresee you know where is it at right now to be able to? Use something like a hydro or eventually a stem controller to be able to actually design things within a 3d space
[00:08:35.104] Stefan Pernar: For the fashion aspect of it, I think that would be really quite interesting. The interesting bit with fashion though is that it's pretty much a 2D exercise because all your cloth is basically a 2D plane. And then you cut out all these pieces and just the way that you put it together, that is how then creates the 3D shape. So, I'm not sure if I can explain that properly, but think about a square. So you have a square, and then if you cut out of the middle, you cut out a diamond shape, okay? Let's say a diamond shape one-third of the length of the square. And then you sew the edges of that diamond shape together. You would create a little bit of a tent, right? And I'm obviously not an expert in this, but this is how you would create 3D forms out of 2D cloth.
[00:09:18.039] Kent Bye: I see and so what I'm hearing I guess is that there's no real benefit at this point to bring in that design process of a 2D process into a 3D environment that they have these existing tools to kind of cut it out but what they don't know is what it's going to look like when it's all put together.
[00:09:32.317] Stefan Pernar: They probably have a pretty good idea, especially when they have a bit more experience, but then to actually see it in the virtual environment, how it actually falls and flows and moves as the model does its catwalk, that is just adding another sense of realism and putting it all in virtual reality. It's like you're basically there. We think it's the next best thing of actually trying it on yourself.
[00:09:51.994] Kent Bye: I see. Where is the physics modeling in terms of how this stuff is moving? What point in the pipeline is producing that information?
[00:09:58.772] Stefan Pernar: That is done in Marvelous Designer, so they have come out absolutely out of the left field with this and created a physics-based cloth simulation that we are using for what we are doing with our virtual fashion shows.
[00:10:10.008] Kent Bye: I see, so they kind of came up with this and then it seems like there's got to be a process of thinking this is how it works but seeing how it works in reality but you think it's gotten to the point where it's matured to what their model of what it's going to look like is how it actually ends up looking?
[00:10:24.912] Stefan Pernar: Probably not a hundred percent but it's only going to get better so I think it's better than looking at the drawing of the cloth itself and there's you know the problem right now in the industry is and I my last job I was chief information officer for Australia's largest retail group in the textile clothing and footwear industry And some of the problems that for example Adidas has is they're not producing all the garments that they're showing to their retailers in the actual physical garments. So what they do is they do a rendering of it and then they show it to the retailers and the retailers then have to decide whether they want to pre-order it or not. And if Adidas doesn't get enough pre-orders, they're not even producing them. But the problem is the retailers say, well, if you're not producing them, I'm not going to pre-order it, because I don't know exactly how it will look like. So there's a bit of a chicken and an egg problem. And I think when we implement a virtual reality representation of the garments, then it becomes much easier for the retailers to actually make a decision and pre-order garments with companies such as Adidas. And Adidas doesn't have to rely on simple renders to convince their retailers to buy their products.
[00:11:23.391] Kent Bye: Yeah, and being at a conference right now where it's predominantly male and may not be as interested in fashion, I'm curious about, you know, what's it been like to kind of be here in the VR space and doing something that is probably going to appeal to a much broader audience but may not be represented here.
[00:11:40.668] Stefan Pernar: Yeah, look, that's the thing. I mean, we are working very closely, for example, with Chris and Blair from the Technolust team, right? And they're doing a fantastic job with what they're doing there, and they're catering so much to the vibe of the conference and everything else, right? And there's other examples of this, Loading Human and all these fantastic projects that are coming out. But what I'm trying to do and what we are trying to do at Virtual Reality Ventures is really trying to make virtual reality a business tool. And that shouldn't be a dirty word. I think the sooner the business community will pick up virtual reality as a tool to benefit their customers, the more virtual reality will really enter the mainstream. And that is what we want to do. We want to design services and we want to develop services, for example, for retail, that they can use virtual reality to create a benefit to their customers.
[00:12:25.683] Kent Bye: So you've also been involved in founding some other VR organizations. Maybe you could tell me a bit about what you've been doing there and what kind of reaction you've been getting.
[00:12:33.745] Stefan Pernar: Well, I'm also co-founder of the Australian Virtual Reality Industry Association, virtualreality.org.au, together with Jake Tracy, Sean Tian, Jeanette Averist, and Joel DeRost. And we are in the process of setting up an industry body that will facilitate the VR industry going forward in terms of tying together businesses, consumers, and developers to provide as smooth an experience as possible. We are running regular meetups. In Melbourne we have Krista Harrier who is running the Sydney virtual reality meetup over there. Sean Edwards who most of you know from the Lunar Flight fame. He is in Brisbane right now and I'm still trying to draft him to run the Brisbane meetup over there. My retail partner for the VR fashion project, Brett Partington from Sydney Street in Adelaide. He is going to start a meetup fairly shortly once we bring out the prototype for the VR fashion show. Overall, the response in the community has been absolutely fantastic. I have just been invited to speak at the Australian CIO Summit about virtual reality, which is of course a great honor and it just shows the interest in the community for these matters. The big question is, of course, when a CIO reaches out to you and says, how can I leverage virtual reality for my business, for my company? What are you going to tell them? What are you going to show them? There's lots of unanswered questions, but I think the potential is here in the community as well to deliver extraordinary benefits to these businesses, particularly in the real estate industry, where I think it is rather advanced what we can do there. Earlier today, we have scanned the area of the Expo with a Matterport camera. So Paul was here for Matterport. We have used this 3D scanner to scan the area over there. And we are going to have on Sunday, after Bruce's show, we're going to have a VR chat where we are actually going to be in the 3D scan of the expo using 3D body scanned avatars that we're going to then recreate a bit of the expo vibe for people who want to participate in that. That's going to be pretty epic. But I'm actually bringing a Metapod camera back to Australia for Nigel Dalton, who is the CIO of the Australian retailers, the REA Group. They are running realestate.com.au, basically a real estate advertising company. It's a $6.5 billion company. They want to go in virtual reality in a big way. He has pre-ordered six dev kits, too. He has engaged me to consult him on virtual reality strategy. and designing and implementing consumer-facing virtual reality services. For example, for remote inspections, one of the major challenges that the industry faces in real estate at the moment is, you know, going to different places. You have to drive from here to there and have a look and only to find out that the place is a dump. Why? You can scan the thing with a Matterport camera, create a virtual reality demo for it, put on the Rift, and then you go through 10 different properties in a matter of half an hour. As easy as that. And Nigel realizes that. He is going to be a leader in the VR field going forward in terms of real estate.
[00:15:15.746] Kent Bye: I see. And yeah, one of the fields that I see is data visualization and being able to bring in a third dimension of being able to look at both information that has an inherent 3D position, but I think having new ways of engaging in data visualization. And I imagine that to be a pretty big part of enterprise software when it comes to virtual reality. I don't know if you have any thoughts on that.
[00:15:37.599] Stefan Pernar: Oh, I absolutely agree with you. I have been the information security officer for Siemens in China, and one of the things that you're dealing with over there is making sure that the network is patched properly. I've actually talked to George Fong, he's the vice president of the Australian Internet Society, about possibly doing a network visualization tool for the Oculus Rift, you know. You could then demonstrate the security status of different systems in different colors. You can see where there are clusters. If you have a cluster of, for example, consistently red systems somewhere, then that would be a call to action to actually see who's overseeing that and maybe do some more training or see what we can do to improve the situation. Humans are not designed to look through spreadsheet information. Information that's hidden in a spreadsheet might not be picked up at all. But if it becomes visualized in the right way, you just see it intuitively and say, all right, we have to do something over there. So, I totally agree with you. I think data visualization is going to be huge going forward.
[00:16:27.704] Kent Bye: Great. And finally, what do you see as the ultimate potential of virtual reality and where you see it going?
[00:16:34.423] Stefan Pernar: Ultimately, I mean, I have heard that Oculus' new goal is to replace human vision. That is pretty ambitious. Where is virtual reality going to go? I mean, wow, this is a pretty broad topic. And I think a lot of people haven't really thought very deeply about the impact virtual reality is going to have on society. And, you know, try before you buy tourism. If you haven't tried Experience Japan, just Google Experience Japan Oculus Rift and try that out. It's just amazing. You know, you're walking around and basically in Japan. I think it is just the impact is going to be absolutely enormous. I don't think we have found the killer app for VR yet. But I think a lot of people, even here at the conference, who think it's going to be huge, they are underestimating how huge it's actually going to be.
[00:17:11.508] Kent Bye: Great. Well, thanks so much. Thank you, Ken.
