Crazy Idea Sunday
September, 2010
"I tell you something that is not right out apparent, but it's getting a huge amount of focus within the company - and it is apparel. We are having a lot of sales growth in apparel. (...) Historically clothing has always been a number one mail order category even pre-internet. And we make it really easy for people to try stuff on - by making it easy to return."
Jeff Bezos, Charlie Rose Interview, July 2010
Ok, time for crazy idea Sundays! This will probably never work, but it's fun.
People are going to be buying more and more apparel online. According to the Bezos quote above, Amazon is working on this category.
Call me crazy, but here's what you do.
Take the millimeter wave scanners the DHS is trying to get into airport security lines, and set up a couple in each major city. Get people to go by one of these scanners and get their body 3D scanned.
Then you get a 3D representation of everything in your store, and some idea of how the clothing behaves under various conditions (lighting, stretching, wind, etc).
Then when someone wants to shop you perform some solid-body physics simulations on your server, and render images and video of what the person would look like in any given set of clothes.
...
Well, at least you'd have more success than the DHS with those things...