Keep Your Pants On: Virtual Dressing Rooms Aren't Ready for the Mainstream

Despite the explosive growth of online shopping, buying clothes has remained stubbornly wedded to the traditions of brick-and-mortar retail. That's not for lack of trying. Many tech entrepreneurs have looked to solutions like virtual fitting rooms—programs that can model a customer's body and guide them towards proper style choices. Rather, it's a reflection of our continued wariness of automating such an intensely personal process. A Huffington Post survey from 2013, for instance, found that 32 percent of US shoppers claimed they would never shop online. A larger study of British shoppers had similar results.

That being said, it's not like online shopping is suffering much. If anything, it's just getting bigger: Forrester Research estimates that annual sales will reach $370 billion in the U.S. alone by 2017. While shoppers might remain hesitant to change their habits, therefore, the prospect of tapping into that market is too lucrative for companies to resist. As with any emerging technology, the success of the virtual fitting room will rely on two related steps. First, someone will have to develop an appropriate system customers find useful. Second, major retailers will have to begin deploying it across their services.

But this is the tech industry, of course, so any company that sees strong enough potential gains could just get a head start by buying out some up-and-coming rival before it has the chance to really hit it big. That's just what e-commerce giant eBay did. The company announced late Wednesday that it acquired PhiSix Fashion Labs, a California-based company that, by its description, "creates 3D models of clothing from photos, pattern files and other sources and simulates the behavior of the garments."

Speaking to VentureBeat, Steve Yankovich, vice president of innovation and new ventures, said that the company is planning to introduce the new tech "across eBay" throughout 2014 and is also “exploring how this technology can be used offline for our retail partners.”

That doesn't say much about how PhiSix's programming will be implemented. But assuming that the technology is able to function as intended, eBay is one of the perfect places to put it to the test. The company's core product is a consumer-to-consumer marketplace, meaning that there's a lot more variation in the stuff available on any given day than one might find trying to buy clothes on, say, J Crew's website. This lets people find plenty of unique items. But in the process, it leaves many important areas of customer service like returns and exchanges up to the users themselves.

As companies like Warby Parker have shown, people appreciate the convenience of shopping online when it's combined with a proper infrastructure that leaves room for experimentation—i.e., actually being able to "try it before you buy it." The prospect of having to reach out to an individual eBay user every time you get a pair of pants that don't fit is an intimidating prospect for many people in comparison. A virtual fitting room could bypass the issue entirely.

That's assuming the thing works, however. And what's tricky about the idea of a virtual dressing room is that even if it's perfectly functional, people may not want to use it. The shoppers polled by HuffPo, for instance, said that one of the things keeping them away from any kind of online clothes shopping was the fact that the entire process felt "impersonal." Modeling the fit of clothes more accurately might help avoid mistakes, but that doesn't mean it would help establish any kind of human connection. Unless, maybe, there's some Siri-like presence to help give you fashion tips. But how many people are going to accept fashion advice from a robot?

Maybe that's why many of the ideas about online clothes shopping that have gotten more hype in recent years have remained at least partially focused on the non-virtual side of things. Warby Parker lets you get your hands on a bunch of different eyeglass frames before deciding which one you actually want to pay for. Upstart online stores like Gilt Groupe and One Kings Lane, meanwhile, attract customers with the promise that they're getting such good deals on designer wares that they should just buy them first and worry about what fits later. Bloomberg Businessweek recently profiled a Russian online retailer that has the most low-tech and clever idea of all: hiring deliverymen who will wait with a customer while they try things on and give them fashion tips.

All these examples show that the most technologically sophisticated solutions aren't necessarily the best ones for aesthetic concerns. eBay might be onto something here, but it will have to come up with something more innovative than a more detailed 3D scanning and modeling tool.

Or who knows, maybe Amazon is already hard at work creating a team of sassy-sounding drones that can give us all the Queer Eye for the Straight Guy treatment. We'll just have to wait and see.