Virtual Wardrobe Coordination

finally posted..

Here it be~

In my research phase I looked at a place named NorSim (or The Lands of NoR) in second life. It is a roleplaying community, the environment looks dark and depressing but it is well populated and the residents seemed happy to be there. From there I found out more about roleplaying communities in general.

research

My virtual community prototype went in another direction. I wanted to solve a recurring problem I have with my friends, which is the need to coordinate our increasingly eccentric wardrobes when we partake in the many adventures that falls upon our otherwise normal lives. Usually this is done over the phone which never fully works out due to the lack of visual aid, none of us can fully remember every piece of clothing owned by each of us nor can our minds sucessfully render what we would look like when we all stand together. The other method is to have a slumber party the night before our adventures, thus being all in the same place when we wake up to dress. This method is immensely fun, however it is quite impractical (schedules, distance, the need to stuff entire wardrobe into suitcase and dragging it from Oshawa to Oakville, etc) and cannot be done every time.

My application will provide a solution to these problems. It is an online event planner and wardrobe coordination tool. The event planning part allows friends to figure out who is going to be at which party, this technogy already exists in things such as the 'Events' componant in Facebook. The second part of it will allow you to create an avatar. You will be able to customize physical appearence such as hair, skin colour, height, etc. After having a base avatar, you will be able to create cloths to put on. The idea is to have simple tools which allow you to create virtual replica's of the real cloths that you have. With all the cloths you create placed in an inventory, when you decide to attend a certain event, you will be aable to place your avatar into a space and dress him/her in the cloths from your, this space is a sort of virtual dress-up room which allows you and your friends to see what item will be worn when the event happens in real life, and from there you can choose to make adjustments as you see fit.

I thought about the possibility of collaborating with clothing brands to create a database of items, which would reduce to need for the members to actually create the virtual versions themselves. When they buy a new shirt, they can scan the barcode in to the computer and it would put a predone virtual version of it in your inventory. However I quickly had doubts about how much this would help me. My friends and I tend to wear our most obscure or heavily modified variety of items, and it would not be possible to cataloge every product from every brand around. Since this project is being built based on my needs, the corporate collaboration idea is scraped.

Anyways, in the file name I called it 'Eventor', but that sounds cheesy.. and the event planning component really isn't the main point of this thing. To say the truth I haven't been able to come up with a proper name... so I'll call it WARG

WARG


~ Marco.