Mirror, mirror on the wall

For stores that literally aim to spoil their customers with choice, the Hyderabad-based start-up, Imaginate, has a virtual solution: an augmented, reality-based trial table that will help shoppers try out apparels and jewels at the click of a mouse. Trialar, a product the company will launch soon, combines a 50-inch flat panel display, Intel core advanced CPU and HD cameras, among other things, to replicate what looks like a dressing table. A database of digitised clothes and jewels are then superimposed on the image of the user standing in front of it to help him skim through an entire database of collections. An analytics-based engine will throw up intelligent choices. “It helps to narrow down the choices; yet helps to present the entire catalogue of a store,” says Hemanth Satyanarayana, CEO of Imaginate Software Labs. “It is a win-win scenario for both the store and the shopper.” The average Indian consumer might still want to physically try on clothes or jewels before purchase. But the gadget will help to winnow down an exhaustive list. The Imaginate team is betting on Trialar for a breakthrough in both the brick and mortar retail segment as well as in e-commerce, wherein it is looking at ways to use the user's webcam to replicate the effects. Hemanth's vision was recognised by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Technology Review. It put his name on the ‘TR35' list of top innovators in the United States aged below 35. The company, which the IIT-Madras graduate founded with Pavan Kosavaraju, another alumnus of the institute, also made it to the list of Nasscom's top 10 products company last year under LaunchPAD. When a shopper is standing in front of Trialar, the HD cameras capture the body measurements in a calibration mode. The shopper can then pick garments from a digital catalogue, and it would display the garment draped on the person. The user can easily browse garments of various colours to pick what looks the best. There is also a multi-screen view to compare, at one go, how different clothes and colours look on the person. Hemanth says Imaginate will provide a web service by which a shopper can stream live “shopping dilemmas” to get an opinion from someone else with internet access. There are no privacy worries as none of the shopper data will be stored. Retailers will have to subscribe to services offered by Imaginate to have their products scanned. Hemanth says the company, now bootstrapped with its own funds, has been receiving many calls from retailers. It is looking at venture funding for scaling up operations.