What Can You Learn From Virtual Mirrors?

A virtual mirror allows someone to use a camera and have that image displayed on a large LED screen. Better yet, with the right software, it can change the image. With that ability, virtual mirrors have been used to see what new glasses look like or to try on dresses – a virtual, flexible fitting room.

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Virtual mirrors and their equivalent as smart phone apps have been around for the last couple of years. There are examples from all over the world. Here are just a couple:

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Marketers have already thought of extending this to social media, as one newspaper reported with a story titled “Every woman’s new best friend? Hyper-realistic new virtual mirror lets you to try on clothes at the flick of the wrist and instantly share the images online”.

This all provides a nice experience for customers and may even help sell a particular item to them. But that’s only the beginning.

Virtual mirrors are a tremendous source of data about consumer behavior. Consider that the system can record every item the consumer looked at and then what she or he bought. Add to that the information about the person that can be detected – hair color, height, etc. With the application of the right analytics, a company can develop insights about how and why some products are successful – for example a particular kind of dress may be what short or tall women are really looking for.

With eye tracking devices, such as those from Tobii, connected to the virtual mirror, even more data can be collected on exactly what the consumer is looking at – for example, the last part of a dress that she looked at before deciding to buy or not to buy.

Going beyond that, an analysis can be done of facial (and body) expressions. I’ve written before about affective computing which is the technology is developing to do and to respond to this kind of measurement.  

[For some additional background on affective computing, see Wikipedia and MIT Media Lab’s website.]

By fully gathering all the data surrounding a consumer’s use of the virtual mirror, its value becomes much more than merely improving the immediate customer experience. In a world of what many consider big data, this adds much more data for the analytics experts on the marketing and product teams to investigate.

Alas, I haven’t seen widespread adoption and merger of these technologies. But the first retailer to move forward this way will have a great competitive advantage. This is especially true for brick-and-mortar retailers who can observe and measure a wider range of consumer behavior than can their purely e-commerce competitors.

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© 2017 Norman Jacknis, All Rights
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Main Street Stores Need A Tech Upgrade

Many small towns wish they had a big box store of some kind as an answer to the retail needs of their residents.   The owners of Main Street stores, of course, worry about big box stores.  After all, Walmart grew into the colossus it is today by first serving the small town and rural market.

Then the growth of Amazon and other e-commerce companies just made things worse for bricks-and-mortar stores on Main Street.

Some stores have sought to survive by focusing on especially narrow niches or creative, quirky products.  But this hasn’t been enough to replace all the retail business that has been lost.

Of course, local leaders and economic development officials just want to revive their main streets somehow – and making the stores their viable is part of that revival.

Meanwhile, the retail business is shifting and using space to create exciting and entertaining environments inside the store, rather than stocking up as much inventory as they can.  

Stores in small towns need to jump ahead and aggressively adopt the new retail technology.  There are some interesting examples of technology that could be used in these Main Street stores.

Adidas built a virtual wall which shows off all of their shoes, lets shoppers see them at all angles and purchase what they want, which can be delivered later.  It amounts to a limitless inventory for a small store.

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Using an approach several companies have taken, Ray Ban has a virtual mirror that will show how a pair of sunglasses looks on your face.  

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Similarly, there are variations of virtual mirrors that let you see how a particular item of clothing looks on you before you buy – or perhaps even before the store orders it from the manufacturer.

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Since most small town stores can’t be open all the time, there’s always a way to allow shoppers to peek inside when the doors are closed.

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Projectors are a relatively inexpensive way of blending the virtual and physical in stores.  Sometimes they can be used to provide further information that a customer wants.

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And store owners of all kinds realize that part of what draws people in is just an entertaining environment.  So here’s another projection example that’s installed for pure fun.

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Finally, there’s nothing to stop a retailer with unique products – like art works – from taking pictures and putting those on the Internet for customers to see, both local and potentially worldwide customers.

Indeed, the retailers in small towns should take advantage of their greater agility than the big store chain behemoths.  That’s the way they will succeed and, in the process, help make Main Street more exciting to visit.

The lesson here is the same as for small towns and rural communities in general – the intelligent use of information and communications technologies can help them flourish in this century.  The impact, indeed, will be much stronger and more visible than it is in big cities.

© 2015 Norman Jacknis

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/121188673865/main-street-stores-need-a-tech-upgrade]

New Uses For Subway Spaces?

Well over a year ago, I began working with executives at the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) to help them envision the future of their facilities.  Traditionally, subway and train stations were considered to be nothing more than places where people got on and off trains.

That was obvious.  Not so obvious is that the MTA is the largest owner of enclosed public space in New York City and that space had the potential to be so much more than passages to trains.

Practical considerations – barely having enough money to run the trains well – meant that the MTA needed to tie in this vision with some revenue.  The MTA gets a small percentage of its total budget by selling advertising space and renting the few locations that were appropriate for retail stores. 

But many of its spaces were long corridors, funny corners, big open areas and the like – which couldn’t work as a traditional store.  In those spaces, however, it is possible to insert a digital retail experience, which would be both a pleasant surprise in the subway halls and a source of revenue where none was possible before.

And, with considerable planning, a partnership of companies that combined digital advertising and technology and an enthusiasm for innovation at the highest levels of the MTA, last week the idea came to life.

In the Bryant Park station at 5th Avenue and 42nd Street, riders came upon a digital shopping experience – a first in the New York subways.  As pictured below, in the Intelligent Color Experience by L’Oréal Paris, one panel consists of a virtual mirror that sees what the woman is wearing and her own skin tones.  Then she gets suggestions on what cosmetics to select and, of course, she can buy the products with a swipe of a credit card.

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For more articles on this experiment, see:

© 2013 Norman Jacknis

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/66372336558/new-uses-for-subway-spaces]