The design studio Crosby Studios he created with the technology company Zero10 a rather unique physical store. A store that offers customers a retail experience, sure, but a digital fashion one. And it does so in an augmented reality environment.
I'll explain? The store, a pop-up store opened in Manhattan's SoHo neighborhood, allows visitors to digitally try on a selection of clothes that don't exist in physical reality. They can only be worn in digital environments. The team behind the project calls it a "physical door" to the metaverse.
Digital fashion, real experience
Looking at it, the shop seems quite real: also because it is. The facade features a classic shop window with pillars, painted with gray and white checkers to suggest the integration between the physical and the virtual. Visitors enter an all-white antechamber that leads into a corridor covered in a pixel pattern, as if passing through a transition area.
Along the corridor, in this "middle ground", customers can linger in a bar area, or go directly to the end. There, in a larger lounge area, there are several booths lined up against the central wall: there, people can try their hand at digital fashion by trying on clothes.
The collection
At the moment, the digital clothes that are part of this experience are five: visitors can “wear them” by downloading an app on their smartphone and then pointing the phone at themselves, or at another person, to see them worn.
The clothes change size and adapt perfectly to the measurements and build of those who are trying them on. One way, say the filmmakers, of making consumers more comfortable with digital fashion, integrating it with the (more familiar) routine of visiting a physical store.
Physical and digital, a future of coexistence?
“Our project is a showcase of how design and technology could coexist in a 'hybrid' world where physical and digital reality will be increasingly connected,” he says George Yashin, CEO by Zero10. “We wanted to create a new concept of space that responds to the needs of retailers to attract a new generation of consumers.”
What do you think? Personally I appreciate the effort to explore this integration, but I don't envision a future where people have to physically travel to a distant place just to try digital fashion that will be worn in the metaverse. Unless the metaverse it is not where someone theorizes: that is, everywhere, in a space "superimposed" on that of physical reality and not in a "closed" place within the confines of a virtual reality viewer.
In any case we will see: in this field everything is magmatic, and in the next few years we will see many attempts to focus on this technology, not all of them will be successful.
