AR/VR: Rethinking E-Commerce with a Virtual Fitting Room on Mobile

Customer

Headquartered in Austria, Reactive Reality AG is a provider of B2B software solutions for fashion e-commerce. The company’s flagship offering is an augmented reality–based content engine called PICTOFiT,  that allows converting pieces of clothes into vivid 2D & 3D assets for a virtual try-on. The product was designed to help retail businesses to increase sales and reduce return rates through driving consumer engagement.

Reinventing e-commerce

Behind the customer’s flagship product there is an PICTOFiT Content Service that allows the creation of accurate 3D models from conventional photos of clothes and vivid avatars of humans. Retailers can benefit immensely from PICTOFiT by offering consumers the opportunity to try on clothes virtually before they buy them. By customizing the shopping experience, they can also reduce their returns rate, increase customer loyalty and boost brand awareness.

Recognizing the opportunity, Reactive Reality AG partnered with HQSoftware to develop a mobile app that allows online shoppers to create their avatars and enjoy all the perks of a virtual fitting room anywhere they are. As the customer was to raise funding for future growth, the MVP had to be delivered under tight deadlines.

The challenging tasks behind 3D modeling

When building the app’s architecture, our developers made sure that the mobile app would be compatible with the proprietary SDK. As the customer was testing different ideas to deliver a top-notch product with unsurpassed user experience, this inevitably led to changing functionality requirements, which, in its turn, called for flexible architectural decisions and approaches.

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Digitizing the fitting room experience

Developers at HQSoftware were working in close collaboration with the customer’s team. The project’s core functionality was written in Objective-C and integrated with the proprietary SDK. After thorough analysis, our engineers came up with architectural approaches that both satisfied business needs and complied with the customer’s requirements (generic API, single-style, markup).

HQSoftware developed a mobile app for iOS and Android that enables online shoppers to take photos of themselves. This involves taking three rounds of photos—from above, middle, and below—ensuring that your body fits the camera frame and is centered.

This is crucial for creating a realistic avatar enabling online shoppers to try on different outfits before making a purchase. For uninterrupted performance and facilitated avatar generation, our team made it possible to deliver all data to the content service without loss even in case of a bad network (mobile/Wi-Fi) connection.

Our engineers tuned a module in the proprietary SDK responsible for smooth data sharing between the customer’s platform and a mobile app.

In addition, our team developed a web service to run on the magic mirror device. The latter can represent a display with an embedded system or the so-called workstation connecting multiple devices. A public display will be used to visualize the content in brick-and-mortar stores. User interaction is performed via a tablet device connected to the display.

Raising investment for future growth

Collaborating with HQSoftware, Reactive Reality AG delivered a mobile app that enables brands and retailers to increase sales as well as user engagement and reduce return rates. With the MVP, the customer was able to raise funding for future development and expand its team by 5x.

Meanwhile, consumers got a truly customized experience that inspires conscious consumption and informed decision-making. Sparing the need to visit brick-and-mortar stores, a virtual fitting room on a mobile device also proves efficient in the pandemic reality of 2020 and 2021.

Philipp Grasmug
CTO & Co-Founder
at ReactiveReality

“We are working with HQSoftware for quite some time now and different projects. The team is very reliable, motivated and eager to deliver the best solutions possible. If you are looking for a partner to outsource your software development, I can highly recommend this company.”