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Even trying to see this from an outsider perspective it seems like a stupid product. As someone else pointed out, they've replaced looking in the dang mirror wi

by vlunkr 10y ago

Even trying to see this from an outsider perspective it seems like a stupid product. As someone else pointed out, they've replaced looking in the dang mirror with a multi-step process involving a few hundred dollars of tech at least. They made sure to throw in "cloud" and "machine learning", but the average consumer doesn't care about that.

Fricken 10y ago
Amazon has had great success with some of their stupid products in recent years. Maybe for you and I We just want to throw on some clothes and get out the door, but for some getting dressed is a ritual. They don't want less steps, they want more. I've had GFs who'll spend hours trying on different outfits. And the next logical step would be a virtual dressing room, that uses an augmented reality overlay of the sort we see with Snapchat's funny faces toys for trying on virtual clothes, which would convince people to buy more shit from Amazon.
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  > And the next logical step would be a virtual dressing room Hey, that was my old startup idea! Also, I kind of wonder why this still isn't a thing; the technology for doing that cheaply has been around for at least 7 years[0], and just being able to quickly view many different outfits on yourself would be useful enough that even I (a totally fashion-oblivious guy) would consider using it. Still, in a perfect world, such a thing would be implemented entirely locally (again, the tech required for doing that is old), with only clothes database being downloaded. This is exactly how this won't be implemented - it will instead send data to cloud for various anti-consumer, business-friendly reasons. -- [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinect
- qohen 10y ago
  > And the next logical step would be a virtual dressing room Another logical step might be skin-cancer screening (surprised that, in 300-ish comments, no one seems to have thought of this), assuming the camera's resolution and/or back-end image-processing software could be made good enough to pick out moles, etc. After all, the camera could take full-body pictures of front, back and sides very easily. Then, if anything odd shows up, you could perhaps ask the user to do a close-up shot of the affected area for further examination and/or just be told to go see a dermatologist. While fully-naked shots would be best for this -- with all the attendant privacy/HIPPA/etc. issues -- I'd expect even doing this while in underwear/bathing suit/etc. would still be a net-win since you'd be able to examine around 90% of the body and you could do it regularly. How often, after all, do people normally get any kind of dermatological exam? (Mind you, a dedicated device for skin-scanning might be best, but, as they say, the best camera is the one you have with you -- if this sort of device becomes popular, then it might be good to make it work for this vs. letting the perfect be the enemy of the good, as they say.)
blister 10y ago
I think you may be missing the brilliance of this product from a sales perspective. Even if this product isn't a massive success, the units they do move will have a huge potential impact to their retail clothing lines. Now, instead of suggesting clothing items in the store based on other items you've looked at, they can now suggest clothing items in their sales material based on what you already own and look good wearing. If I had this product and Amazon started sending me curated outfits that they knew would look great on me and matched my style, I'd probably start using Amazon exclusively to fill out my wardrobe. As it stands now, I buy almost everything EXCEPT clothes through Amazon and prefer to let my wife buy me things she wants me to wear. This product, on it's own, is a game changer in the fashion industry. Now Amazon has a compelling and unique product that is going to make it increasingly difficult for other retail outlets to compete in the same space. And once we start seeing "apps" for this camera that auto-instagram/snapchat your pictures, I think we're going to see a huge demand in the teen/millennial female market for what is kind of a geeky niche product.
- hirsin 10y ago
  Put this way, I'm interested. If it could reliably figure out my size and show me clothes that it guarantees will look good on my body type - I'd probably be interested. Although I'd want to just rent it, not own it.
- TheOtherHobbes 10y ago
  I'm not sure what's creepier - the privacy issues, or the fact that everyone seems to be assuming that machines can make better fashion choices than people.
  - qohen 10y ago
    Is it that hard to imagine that a machine can do a better job than at least some people, particularly if the machine is trained by experts and/or Big Data and/or even Mechanical Turk? There's a reason we have terms like "fashion-challenged" after all. Also, even if its judgement were about as good as a person's, it might be helpful in being able to quickly render that judgement vs. people to-ing-and-fro-ing. A machine might be able to even provide explanations for why it thinks something looks better than others, e.g. "While this outfit fits you well, it does not look as good on you now as it did 5 months ago -- its light colors make you look very pale, possibly because it is currently winter and you are not as tanned as you were then (or perhaps you just have a cold) -- better to save it for summer months".

by vlunkr 10y ago

Fricken 10y ago

Amazon has had great success with some of their stupid products in recent years. Maybe for you and I We just want to throw on some clothes and get out the door, but for some getting dressed is a ritual. They don't want less steps, they want more. I've had GFs who'll spend hours trying on different outfits. And the next logical step would be a virtual dressing room, that uses an augmented reality overlay of the sort we see with Snapchat's funny faces toys for trying on virtual clothes, which would convince people to buy more shit from Amazon.

TeMPOraL 10y ago
> And the next logical step would be a virtual dressing room Hey, that was my old startup idea! Also, I kind of wonder why this still isn't a thing; the technology for doing that cheaply has been around for at least 7 years[0], and just being able to quickly view many different outfits on yourself would be useful enough that even I (a totally fashion-oblivious guy) would consider using it. Still, in a perfect world, such a thing would be implemented entirely locally (again, the tech required for doing that is old), with only clothes database being downloaded. This is exactly how this won't be implemented - it will instead send data to cloud for various anti-consumer, business-friendly reasons. -- [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinect
qohen 10y ago
> And the next logical step would be a virtual dressing room Another logical step might be skin-cancer screening (surprised that, in 300-ish comments, no one seems to have thought of this), assuming the camera's resolution and/or back-end image-processing software could be made good enough to pick out moles, etc. After all, the camera could take full-body pictures of front, back and sides very easily. Then, if anything odd shows up, you could perhaps ask the user to do a close-up shot of the affected area for further examination and/or just be told to go see a dermatologist. While fully-naked shots would be best for this -- with all the attendant privacy/HIPPA/etc. issues -- I'd expect even doing this while in underwear/bathing suit/etc. would still be a net-win since you'd be able to examine around 90% of the body and you could do it regularly. How often, after all, do people normally get any kind of dermatological exam? (Mind you, a dedicated device for skin-scanning might be best, but, as they say, the best camera is the one you have with you -- if this sort of device becomes popular, then it might be good to make it work for this vs. letting the perfect be the enemy of the good, as they say.)

blister 10y ago

I think you may be missing the brilliance of this product from a sales perspective. Even if this product isn't a massive success, the units they do move will have a huge potential impact to their retail clothing lines. Now, instead of suggesting clothing items in the store based on other items you've looked at, they can now suggest clothing items in their sales material based on what you already own and look good wearing. If I had this product and Amazon started sending me curated outfits that they knew would look great on me and matched my style, I'd probably start using Amazon exclusively to fill out my wardrobe. As it stands now, I buy almost everything EXCEPT clothes through Amazon and prefer to let my wife buy me things she wants me to wear. This product, on it's own, is a game changer in the fashion industry. Now Amazon has a compelling and unique product that is going to make it increasingly difficult for other retail outlets to compete in the same space. And once we start seeing "apps" for this camera that auto-instagram/snapchat your pictures, I think we're going to see a huge demand in the teen/millennial female market for what is kind of a geeky niche product.

hirsin 10y ago
Put this way, I'm interested. If it could reliably figure out my size and show me clothes that it guarantees will look good on my body type - I'd probably be interested. Although I'd want to just rent it, not own it.
TheOtherHobbes 10y ago
I'm not sure what's creepier - the privacy issues, or the fact that everyone seems to be assuming that machines can make better fashion choices than people.
- qohen 10y ago
  Is it that hard to imagine that a machine can do a better job than at least some people, particularly if the machine is trained by experts and/or Big Data and/or even Mechanical Turk? There's a reason we have terms like "fashion-challenged" after all. Also, even if its judgement were about as good as a person's, it might be helpful in being able to quickly render that judgement vs. people to-ing-and-fro-ing. A machine might be able to even provide explanations for why it thinks something looks better than others, e.g. "While this outfit fits you well, it does not look as good on you now as it did 5 months ago -- its light colors make you look very pale, possibly because it is currently winter and you are not as tanned as you were then (or perhaps you just have a cold) -- better to save it for summer months".