Computer Vision

Every e-commerce catalogue has a dirty secret, and it’s a number nobody likes to say out loud: the percentage of products that have a proper photo of a real person wearing them. Ours was 73%. Which means more than a quarter of what we sold, thousands of frames, was represented online by a flat shot of the product on a white background, while its neighbour had a crisp image of a model looking great in it. The model shots convert better. Everyone knows this. The problem is that closing the gap means a physical photoshoot, and a physical photoshoot does not scale. We took catalogue coverage from 73% to 100% in about a month. Not by shooting faster. By not shooting at all for the long tail. ...

Virtual try-on has a problem nobody puts in the marketing video: it works beautifully for people who don’t already wear glasses. For everyone else (which, at an eyewear company, is most of your customers), the experience is broken. You point the camera at your face, the app renders a gorgeous new frame, and it sits on top of the glasses you’re already wearing. Two pairs of glasses. It looks ridiculous, and worse, it doesn’t answer the only question the customer has: do these look good on me? So we built the thing that sounds impossible when you say it out loud: remove the glasses the user is wearing, live, from the camera feed, before rendering the new ones. On the phone. Fast enough that it feels like video, not a slideshow. ...