Virtual Clothing

We have developed a first virtual mirror prototype for clothes that uses augmented reality techniques to change the color and a printed logo on a shirt while a user stands in front of the system wearing a prototype shirt with a (line)-pattern. Similar to looking into a mirror when trying on clothes, the same impression is created but for virtually textured garments. The mirror is replaced by a large display that shows the mirrored camera image, for example, the upper portion of a person's body. By estimating the elastic deformations of the cloth from a single camera in the 2D image plane and recovering the illumination of the textured surface of a shirt in real time, an arbitrary virtual texture is realistically augmented onto the moving clothes so that the person appears to be wearing the virtual clothes. The result is a combination of the real video and the new augmented model, which produces a realistic impression of the virtual clothes. The system was honored as Selected Landmark 2009 (Ort im Land der Ideen 2009) by the Germany-Land of Ideas initiative. In the same year the European Association for Self-Service singled out the Virtual Mirror as the most innovative product displayed at the international trade fair Kiosk Europe 2009.