[HN Gopher] Launch HN: Revery.AI (YC S21) Scalable deep learning...
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Launch HN: Revery.AI (YC S21) Scalable deep learning-based virtual
dressing room
Hi HN! We are Kedan, Jeff, and Min Jin and we are co-founders of
Revery AI. We've built a virtual dressing room for online retailers
that allows customers to visualize any combination of garments on
any model. The rise of online shopping has posed significant
challenges for fashion retailers. The lack of ability to try on and
visualize outfits has made shopping less interactive, contributing
to low conversion rates and high return rates compared to brick-
and-mortar shopping. Virtual dressing rooms can recreate the lost
experience of trying on clothes in person. There are other
companies working on a virtual dressing room. However, the reason
why this is not taking off is scalability. Fashion ecommerce
platforms have thousands, if not millions of SKUs. Current
approaches generally require custom Photoshop work or expensive 3D
models which are difficult to scale. In contrast, our solution
leverages our machine learning research to automate the entire
process, resulting in the first scalable virtual dressing room that
can be easily integrated with any large e-commerce platform with
millions of SKUs. Rather than time-consuming 3d modeling, our
system works with basic images. The goal, of course, is to produce
accurate and realistic visualizations of outfits on people. A naive
solution would be to simply copy-paste the garment onto the model.
This presents two problems. 1) If the poses of the model/garment
are mismatched, copy-paste does not work. 2) Even with ideal poses,
copy-paste does not take into account garment-garment, garment-
model interactions and also ignores lighting, shadows, etc. We use
deep learning to overcome this problem. For problem 1) we use a
series of image warpers to warp the garment onto an approximate
body location in the appropriate pose. This differs from current
approaches that typically use only a single warp which is extremely
limited. For 2) we train an image generator that takes in relevant
inputs (includes the model image, garment image, pose, etc) and
produces a realistic image of the model wearing the garment. Our
system produces significant improvements in size, fit, and drape
compared to prior art, allowing us to create realistic images of
any model wearing any combination of garments. If anyone is
interested in additional details, we published an earlier version
of our system here https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.10817. We also have
another paper that will appear in the CVPR2021 conference soon.
This approach makes integration with retailers far easier because
it requires only a single garment image on a uniform background per
SKU. Upon receiving their catalog, our team processes them at a
rate of 1 million images per week. We then work with the retailer
to create a widget that can be easily injected into their website.
The simplicity of this solution means that clients can have a
virtual dressing room live in as quick as a few days. A live demo
can be viewed here:https://revery.ai/demo.html. We've successfully
integrated with several fashion e-commerce retailers. Through
working with our clients, we've shown that our dressing room
improves the average engagement of users by 6x and, more
importantly, the conversion rate by 6x. Additionally, we've seen
increases in average order value (AOV) and decreases in return
rates. Our solution also presents several use cases beyond the
virtual dressing room. Because image generation is at the heart of
our business, clients have also expressed interest in using our
services to generate photoshoot images to forgo expensive studio
photography. Funnily enough, we have never envisioned ourselves
doing a start-up in the fashion space as our backgrounds are all in
computer science and research. We are all computer vision Ph.D.
students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and
virtual try-on was initially just an academic pursuit. Kedan was
researching fashion AI applications such as product recommendation
while Min Jin was working on image generation and manipulation.
Jeff was working on applied machine learning to practical problems
like medicine and image search. We quickly realized that our
individual expertise was compatible in tackling this difficult yet
exciting problem. While image-based virtual try-on is an active
research field in academia, no one has yet been able to
productionize this technology. The transition from research to
product is non-trivial - published research often operates on a
largely simplified version of the problem. Generating realistic and
accurate high-fidelity images of people and clothing is harder than
it sounds. Inaccuracies are simply unacceptable for customers.
People will not be happy if their miniskirt turns out to be a long
skirt! It took us a year to get satisfactory results and at that
point, we realized that this academic exercise can actually be a
tool that real users want to use. That's when we decided to launch
Revery AI to bring a virtual dressing room shopping experience to
all shoppers and retailers. We would love to hear any feedback or
answer any questions!
Author : mchong6
Score : 59 points
Date : 2021-06-14 15:59 UTC (7 hours ago)
| kunecke wrote:
| Awesome product. As others have said, this has huge potential in
| eliminating costly photoshoots. If you can find a few big brands
| to partner with, you can completely disrupt the modeling
| industry.
| likedan5 wrote:
| Haha yeah, photoshoots are definitely not the first thing in
| our mind, but seems like there's real need for it.
| marvinkennis wrote:
| Super interesting product. Would it be possible for me to use
| this with images I find online?
| likedan5 wrote:
| It's possible, and I imagine would be a very cool feature for a
| shopping app!
|
| We went to the B2B path after launching Style Space
| (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/style-space/id1535818149) and
| realize we don't know how to run e-commerce haha. Might revisit
| the shopping app / marketplace idea once we have more
| validation and tractions.
| im2nguyen wrote:
| This looks great! The demo currently shows front poses only, can
| it also do other poses? Instead of a virtual fitting room, could
| you use this to generate product images with models? Would the
| pricing be different since you're delivering a set number of
| images (generated once) instead of a widget that generates
| different combinations?
|
| Also, what's the smallest store you're willing to work with (min
| # of SKU)?
| likedan5 wrote:
| "product images with models" Some of our customer has requested
| this service and we are doing it for them. There is difference:
| we use a large deep learning model that has higher latency and
| we do more QA on these images.
|
| The pricing will be obviously more expensive. We charge
| slightly cheaper than market rate with more realistic image
| quality.
|
| "Also, what's the smallest store you're willing to work with
| (min # of SKU)?"
|
| There's not strict line. a store with a few hundred SKUs would
| work well. It depends on how shoppers's shopping habits: we
| noticed for smaller shop, shoppers more often come looking for
| specific items than browsing. Our product is more valuable for
| shopper with exploratory mindset.
| Anisa_Mirza wrote:
| As someone who loves fashion, only shops online and hates the
| virtual dressing room experience, I am extremely excited with
| what you guys are building. Congrats!
| likedan5 wrote:
| wow, that's awesome, thanks! Any suggestions / improvements?
| Most retailers are asking for diverse body shape supports --
| super hard, we're working on it.
| adrianscheff wrote:
| Interesting and congratulations for launching! :)
|
| ON a side note the bags look ugly, I was expecting them to be
| resized and appearing as held by hands. Instead I got this:
| https://imgur.com/a/xsJAKR6
|
| Is this something you're aware of? PS: I really like the
| wrinkling on clothes.
| likedan5 wrote:
| Ah, the bag feature is very new, and sth we're still working on
| to improve. Sorry for the disappointment, but thx for the
| feedback.
| lmurata wrote:
| Love the product and really impressive results! Congrats on your
| work!! :)
| sharemywin wrote:
| Could you train a model on the reverse and make a background less
| image out of a normal picture?
|
| I'm think if you created an app where people can let friends or
| others try on cloths from their closet.
|
| Also, Wondering about a shopify plug in?
|
| Also, can you just take clothing images from amazon other
| merchants use an affiliate program to sell from a virtual try on
| app.
|
| What's the smallest merchant you work with?
| mchong6 wrote:
| Do you mean background matting that removes the background of
| an image? Perhaps something like this
| https://github.com/senguptaumd/Background-Matting
|
| Yes! We definitely want to allow people to try on clothes from
| their closet. This will involve digitizing your own closet
| which is something we are working on to make it easy for
| everybody.
|
| For shopify, we have plans on releasing that in the near
| future. We do have an app on IOS
| https://apps.apple.com/us/app/style-space/id1535818149 that
| pulls garments from different websites for you to visualize
| different looks.
|
| Right now we are working with platforms with larger SKUs. We
| will support smaller merchants with our shopify plugin.
| alicevdeng wrote:
| Looks super cool! The demo is awesome :) How are you guys able to
| support retailers so quickly? That's insane!
| likedan5 wrote:
| Haha, because we build the first virtual try-on system that's
| fully automated! We've seen 50+ other companies doing virtual
| try-on, but they need a lot of manual work to process each
| garment, thus have difficulty scaleing.
| palakchokshi wrote:
| Can you perform the same model/garment fit with an uploaded model
| image? If so this would be revolutionary in reducing returns of
| online garment shopping. To see how a garment stretches when put
| on consumer's body type would be very beneficial. Ideally this
| would be done in real time but even a minute's wait to see how
| the item will look on you might be acceptable for consumers if it
| means less disappointment when you try on the item physically at
| home and elimination of a return.
| likedan5 wrote:
| This is our ultimate goal! It will take some time :)
|
| It's very hard to ensure good quality rendering on user
| uploaded image (a lot of out of distribution). We've seen
| others who try to do that, but quality not yet great.
| modo_ wrote:
| hey, congrats on launching- the demo is impressive :)
|
| at unspun.io our customers create a body scan and we use that
| to make completely custom garments.
|
| have you all considered supporting a use case similar to
| ours: virtual try-on with a 3d model as the input instead of
| user uploaded image?
| likedan5 wrote:
| We're considered the 3D option, it's difficult bc most
| retailers don't have 3D garments and it take very long time
| to create them. Maybe when that content becomes more
| available, we'll eventually replace our current system with
| 3D.
|
| Interested to learn more about the type of 3D model you
| make. Drop me an email kedan@revery.ai if you're interested
| to chat :)
| [deleted]
| dannyw wrote:
| Do you think there's an opportunity in shoes too? Probably less
| variance, but I wonder if you can deliver still positive impacts.
| reveryai wrote:
| Yeah, we are working on supporting shoes!
| pdq wrote:
| Feet are incredibly diverse, so shoe sizing is not trivial.
|
| This would require either multiple measurements of the feet or
| a 3D scan, to be able to get a good fit on a shoe.
| [deleted]
| the-dude wrote:
| Wasn't there a famous startup doing this in 2000/2001 ?
| likedan5 wrote:
| Boo.com!
| the-dude wrote:
| Thank you.
| jeffreyz wrote:
| Yea I believe they raised some absurd amount of money ($100
| million+) and blew it mostly on marketing. We definitely
| won't make that mistake haha :)
| srekhi wrote:
| Awesome product.
|
| Two things:
|
| 1) would love to rotate the model to see how it looks from all
| angles
|
| 2) being able to customize the model to look similar to me (so I
| can get a sense for how the clothes would fit on my body) would
| be awesome.
| likedan5 wrote:
| Thanks!
|
| 1) would love to rotate the model to see how it looks from all
| angles.
|
| This our current product can do, if we were are able to get the
| side and back garment image from retailer (surprisingly a lot
| of them don't carry these images).
|
| 2) being able to customize the model to look similar to me (so
| I can get a sense for how the clothes would fit on my body)
| would be awesome.
|
| This one is very hard, despite a lot of ask on it. We're
| working on it!
| kolanos wrote:
| From a purely layman's perspective, why couldn't you get a
| head to toe photo of a subject, then have the subject enter
| in their height, then use that measurement to get the
| relative measurements of other body parts? You'd need a way
| to quickly identify the points of the body, but i can't
| imagine that is the difficult part here? The head to toe
| photo of the subject would need to be wearing skin tight
| apparel, such as underwear to ensure clothing doesn't throw
| the relative measurements off.
|
| Interested to know where my assumptions here don't line up
| with reality.
| likedan5 wrote:
| Haha, cool idea! I thought we might had this discussion
| sometime internally. The truth is we haven't got time to
| explore it yet.
|
| One possible difficulty I see is still how do we collect
| the face data / body data. Image generation has a strong
| bias toward domain -- meaning if we use one kind of faces
| during training, we will need that same kind of face during
| inference (with the same angle, lighting, etc..). It's
| possible but need more thoughts on how to ask users for
| good image.
|
| I think that's one reason we avoid user uploaded images so
| far, bc it's hard for users to understand exactly what kind
| of image we need, and why their images doesn't work well
| sometimes. There's a lot to explore on this front before we
| can get a market ready product.
|
| Regardless, cool idea, appreciated:)
| jonwalch wrote:
| Based on your demo, I would suggest going this route "clients
| have also expressed interest in using our services to generate
| photoshoot images to forgo expensive studio photography."
|
| You can make a ton of money doing that. I personally don't find a
| ton of value in this as a consumer. I want to see how the clothes
| look on me, not on a model.
|
| I can see people wanting to throw together pretend outfits on a
| model, but I'm not sure how you monetize that.
| likedan5 wrote:
| Yeah, we are gonna do it for a few clients and see how well
| that works. Could be a quicker way to market than the dressing
| room.
|
| "I personally don't find a ton of value in this as a consumer.
| I want to see how the clothes look on me, not on a model. I can
| see people wanting to throw together pretend outfits on a
| model, but I'm not sure how you monetize that."
|
| Agree, I bet everyone wants to see outfit on themself or a
| person that resembles themselves. It's just HARD to build such
| product, period. I think at least for some people if not for
| everyone, styling is a important part. Also, style color
| mismatch accounts for about 18-20% of the returns. So far, we
| see a substantial conversion rate increase from the dressing
| room on our clients' website. Trying to get more validations to
| figure out the actual value of the dressing room.
| jonwalch wrote:
| Makes a lot of sense. Thanks for the reply!
| er4hn wrote:
| I love the idea of this!
|
| One issue I noticed is that adding a jacket does not seem to
| work. It shows me the loading circle, then goes back to the shirt
| / pants / no jacket image.
| jeffreyz wrote:
| Thank you and thanks for trying out the demo! The jackets
| should work, can you point to which jacket(s) don't work? It is
| also possible you caught us updating something in the backend
| while trying.
| speculator wrote:
| Having worked for a big luxury ecommerce brand, I can say this
| has huge potential -> "clients have also expressed interest in
| using our services to generate photoshoot images to forgo
| expensive studio photography."
|
| Studio costs can be high, not to mention the delay in getting new
| product images uploaded.
| likedan5 wrote:
| True. We actually didn't thought about this, but some of our
| client we try to sell the dressing room ask us to make
| photoshoots since it's more urgent. So now we are doing that
| too haha. How large do you think the total addressable market
| is for this?
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