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.
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.
[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.
[00:00:47.035] 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.
[00:02:42.173] 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.
[00:04:07.590] 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.
[00:05:51.303] 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.
[00:06:23.955] 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.
[00:06:46.688] 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
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