Virtual Try On
Re-imagining an Immersive Experience in Fashion
Spoiler
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Context: Who's the client?
Seivson is an emerging high-end fashion house focused on sustainable design and empowering women through clothing. In 2021, the brand ranked first at Tokyo Fashion Week and presented collections in both Taipei and Tokyo, reaching over 500 in-person attendees and more than 20,000 online viewers.
Info
02
Project Topics:
Role:
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​Fashion Show
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Virtual Try On
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Digital Vendor Show
Design Engineer
Timeline:
2020​ Nov - 2021 April
6 Months
Key Contributions:
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​​Experience Research
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Digital Garment Development
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AR Virtual Try-on Experience
Why AR?
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When the pandemic restricted travel and in-person fittings, sharing physical garments became both risky and inefficient. AR virtual try-on offered a fast, contact-free solution, allowing users to explore garments digitally while maintaining engagement and confidence in the purchase process.
Phase 1: Pre-show
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What's the theme?
A runway show is a form of storytelling. Fashion designers tell their stories through clothes and we help them convey the story with a show. So first, we needed to know what the story is for the season.
"The show explores the duality of human nature, visualized through the presence of an angelic and a darker persona on each individual’s shoulders. It questions which side reflects one’s true identity, highlighting the tension between restraint, desire, and self-expression."
- Jill Shen, Designer of Seivson
Visual Posters
Version 1: The Last Supper set design for the show
Version 2: The Last Supper with Seivson's clothes
The show is built around a tension between intensity and restraint, expressed through a red-dominant palette layered with cool-toned accents. Heavy creases, folds, and complex geometric forms create a sense of internal conflict, reflecting the fragmented and multifaceted nature of identity. The contrast between warmth and coolness, softness and sharp structure, mirrors the dual sides of personality and questions which version of the self is ultimately revealed.
Who are the audiences?​
Celebrities
Wholesale Vendors
Press
Phase 2: Try On Development
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3D Garment Model
The virtual try-on garments were created in CLO3D, a digital garment-making software that mirrors real-world fashion production. Each garment was constructed piece by piece using individual pattern panels, which were then assembled and simulated as meshes on a digital body. This approach preserved accurate proportions, seams, and garment structure, enabling realistic drape and movement while remaining compatible with real-time AR visualization.
Realistic Garment Movement
To achieve realistic garment movement, vertex painting was applied in Maya to control how different areas of the garment respond to motion. By assigning varying weights across the mesh, I defined zones of stiffness and flexibility, allowing the fabric to flow naturally rather than move as a rigid surface with body motion. I iterated back and forth between simulation and adjustment, translating real fabric weight and behavior into vertex weights so the digital garment reflected realistic drape, gravity, and movement in real time.
First implementation
Final outcome after multiple iterations
AR Development
The virtual try-on experience was built in Lens Studio using a body tracking–based pipeline. Real-time body tracking was used to detect and anchor the user’s body, enabling the garment to follow natural movement. A body occluder mesh was applied to ensure correct depth and layering, allowing the garment to appear realistically behind or in front of the body where appropriate. The 3D garment was then aligned to the tracked body mesh, combining accurate body positioning with optimized garment geometry to achieve a stable and believable real-time try-on experience.
Pipeline: Body Tracking + Occluder + Body Mesh + 3D Garment Model
>This was made before Lens Studio came out with the Try On module in 2022
Phase 3: Lens Optimization
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Challenges & Learnings
Optimizing garment render load for mobile AR - realizing garments are especially heavy in AR
Reducing Polygon Count
High-resolution garments exported from CLO3D were optimized by reducing polygon density while preserving the overall silhouette. Invisible inner faces were removed and non-essential folds were simplified to ensure the garment could run smoothly at real-time frame rates on mobile devices.
Texture Optimization
Texture memory usage was optimized by lowering texture resolutions, applying compressed texture formats, and reusing texture atlases across garment components. Realizing high resolution texture actually didnt make much differences. This reduced the overall memory footprint while maintaining sufficient visual detail for AR try-on.
final version of clothes simulation
Limiting Real-Time Deformation
Instead of full cloth simulation, garments were attached to a tracked body anchor to ensure stable performance. Subtle motion effects, such as scaled movement and controlled deformation, were used to simulate fabric flow without costly per-frame vertex updates.
Phase 3: Buyer Show for Wholesale Vendors
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Trunk shows are usually held the day after the show for vendors to purchase what they want from this season. Both physical for local vendors and virtual for international vendors from all over the world. We held a total of 5 separate virtual trunk shows with live intepretors for Japan, the U.S., UK, France and Korea. To recreate the show scene for the physical trunk show, we set up the set scene from the actual show in the middle of the area surrounded by scents we spread out at the show and the garments.
Scent Incorporation
After meetings with the designers, show director and the PR team, we had a brief idea of how the models can walk, music&lighting...etc. But first focused on the scent that was going to be pumped into the audience area. It is rare that a fashion show would have a themed scent that is cohesive with the show story but we wanted to give the audiences a more 360 experience. So we collaborated with a local Taiwanese fragrance brand, EYE CANDLE, to customize a scent that gives out a futuristic feeling. I wish you could smell it through here on a website because after some adjustments, the fifth generation blew my mind when I smelled the sample. A subtle freshness in the beginning but gradually turning a little complicated.
"This is exactly how life smells like."
-A HOM, co-founder of Seivson
We all laughed in tears in a 4 am meeting and felt satisfied with the outcome.
Augmenting Immersion with Music
Sets
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Press
Vogue
marie claire
BAZAAR
Wazaiii
jusky
What did the wholesale buyers say?
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It was by far the most interesting
fashion show I have attended! First time trying virtual try on, it was futuristic and I can see how the industry deploy such technology in the future.
Henry Chen
I knew there was a lot of restrictions during the pandemic so I would understand if the show did not feel complete. But they pulled everything together with the digital thing so well and creative.
Absolutely impressive.
Jenny Tsai
What they wanted to convey through the show was clear. It was like watching a Broadway show. I loved the narrative and, of course, the clothes! There were layers over layers but it did not seem to be overwhelming in a balanced way. It was mindblown to see the designs. It's nice to be able to try the pieces on from Kyoto the digital try on they introduced this season.
Fiona Hong
