The future of online shopping
There are plenty of examples when reality does not meet expectations, and the cases can be of an astonishing wide variety. A food picture may disappoint, dating app photos may give a wrong impression, the travel agent pictures forgot the photo showing the (absent) view of your apartment, and so forth.
If you think about it, it is kind of a fundamental problem of visual representation. Even with good intentions is it impossible to represent or communicate reality in a way that always meets expectations. Yet, we can try. And
we can certainly try a bit harder than the images that are currently used in online retail!
Image on the left is taken from a School of Motion instruction about photogrammetry. Image on the right is our own study on interactive imagery for Lululemon.
Ideally, an online shop aims to reduce the difference between the expectations raised by product photos, and the reality of receiving the actual products. Minimizing expectation vs reality has a positive effect on consumer experience and lowers returns (and thus both transport and sometimes destruction of product). In this project you will investigate various creative technological solutions that may serve the expectation vs reality reduction more substantial than mere photos or videos. One direction could be photogrammetry, but we are open to other visualizations! And besides the various ways of visually capturing the essence of products, you may also consider how you would design the interaction. For example, we made this interactive images for Lululemon that you can see on the side image.
