Infographic: A Historical Look at Online Holiday Shopping
1:08 pm
Markerless Augmented Reality in JCPenny’s Virtual Dressing Room
2:30 pm
An impressive new offering from JCPenny and Seventeen Magazine allows teenager to virtually try on clothes via a markerless augmented reality shopping website without any of the hurdles of their predecessors. Utilizing technology from metaio, the “virtual dressing room” simply allows the user to stand in front of the PC without any special printed markers, and the image recognition algorithms take over from there and overlay the selected items of clothes over the display.
“The application is a true breakthrough in online product visualization, as clothes are automatically overlaid on the consumer`s real-time video image through their webcam,” said Kristine Welker, vice president of sales and marketing for Hearst Magazines Digital Media. “With the help of our exclusive retail partner JCPenney, the virtual dressing room makes online shopping easy and viral: with a simple wave of a hand, shoppers can select, rate and share their top picks with friends via Facebook or email, and even purchase the items directly from jcp.com.”
An impressive use of Augmented Reality, and a huge win for markerless AR. Full press release after the break.
Black Friday and Cyber Monday Visualized
1:00 pm
Compete.com has taken their tracking data for the big shopping holiday weekend and compared the numbers on some of the largest merchants on the internet, taking particular interest in the price wars between WalMart and Amazon.com .
Generally speaking, mass merchants fared very well online last Friday. While more people are going online to shop this year, bringing cautious smiles to nervous retailers, consumers are continuing the trend of concentrating their shopping on large mass merchant websites in search of deep discounts and one-stop shopping.
Of course, these numbers don’t come from actual traffic but rather from compete’s “estimated” traffic, which in my experience is somewhat speculative (if you search for the VizWorld.com traffic, it’s waaay off from what Google Analytics & my own logfiles say), but the trends are interesting. In particular you can see how brick-n-mortar Walmart had a larger Black Friday than Cyber Monday, but Amazon was opposite.
VizWorld.com 
Comments