Sourcing Euphoria
A dynamic new Web site holds breathtaking implications for the apparel industry. The suburban town of Chatsworth—tucked away in the northwest corner of Los Angeles County—seems an unlikely place for one of the most technically savvy Web site and software development studios around. But there it is, in a small industrial park: NextStep Broadband’s (NSB) new Creative Technology Center.
Executive vice president and co-founder Jason Chaffetz has positioned the company as a digital content enabler for the professional marketplace with its grouping of technologies called “3-D Communicator,” which converges voice, video and data with advanced three-dimensional graphics applications.
The Creative Technology Center provides clients, such as Wella, Paul Mitchell and Sebastian, with compelling applications that improve communication, education and sales training. The Center also offers dramatic “virtual store” presentations that interactively take the Web/CD/DVD viewer into multidimensional settings, where the click of a mouse launches a product off its shelf and into a magnified rotating image with explanations and a demo of its every detail.
Significant in-roads have been made into the beauty and cosmetics fields by NSB. However, the transferability into the fashion/apparel field is obvious and has application both for the retail and manufacturing sides.
NSB’s design team is headed by James Gelinas, a professional research and development beautician/pro hairdresser turned high-tech Web and audio-visual interface designer. Gelinas says his vision for the company includes “wonderful ways to take the complexities of apparel design and marketing into digital realities.” With Gelina’s plan, NSB will provide a forum where the educational and training needs of compatible industries (including apparel) can be addressed in a multidimensional format.
“We’ve seen lots of static fashion objects placed [in Web sites] and rotated,” says Gelinas. “But with 3-D Communicator, such objects need not just rotate but be seen from multiple perspectives.”
Objects can rotate while the subject is independently moving in real time. The software can simulate a change in draping and texture while illustrating the cutting and sewing procedures. Indeed, users can do all this and zoom in on very close detail, freeze the image and then click for an explanation in text or voice-over sound.
“The Rig” is one of the more impressive tools at the Technology Center. The huge doughnut construction is set in the middle of a large warehouse/stage and features 72 synchronized 35mm cameras, all rendering very high resolution three-dimensional images of whatever is placed in the center of the unit.
The day we visited, a fashion model was the subject and all 72 rolls of film would be developed and then scanned and digitized for a full 360-degree view that would offer Web site and/or CD ROM viewers the ability to zoom in and rotate an image with the click of a mouse. It’s all in what the software does with the imagery after it’s recorded.
Take, for example, “StyleU4ea,” one of the team’s proudest accomplishments now being previewed (without every component of the project online yet) at www.styleu4ea.com. The site was launched last August at the Beauty & Barber Supply Institute’s annual trade show in Las Vegas. It’s a big multimedia experience and, of course, the DSL or other big bandwidth Internet users will get a rapid-fire dose of MacroMedia’s Flash Web interface, which launches a soundtrack that responds to your every mouse click as you enter a virtual ocean of multilayered motion graphics. The slower dial-up modem user will probably see much of this engrossing effect after some delay in loading. But, as we know, the proliferation of big bandwidth (through satellite, cable and phone services) is well on its way, and, truth be said, this software really needs it.
“StyleU4ea” demonstrates a full B2B “portal” approach to one specific industry (closely allied to the apparel industry) with a site that offers exciting, content-rich settings for marketing, technical education, fashion-trend forecasting, retailing and product promotion and articulation.
Primary sections in the site include: “Education,” where stop-action 3-D offers intimate detail of step-by-step hair cutting; “The Promenade,” which showcases custom-designed stores that feature richly detailed products; “What’s Hot,” which puts the spotlight on innovations and new product launches to inspire sales; “In-Depth Catalog,” where thousands of industry products are detailed; “Catwalk,” where trends and fashion from all over the world are archived; and “Entertainment,” which offers a variety of related lifestyle activities and destinations.
It’s a lively all-in-one online place with the potential to excite a wide-ranging appeal that could easily go well beyond its stated professional audience to include consumers, students, manufacturers, distributors and more. Allied fields, the apparel industry in particular, might look to this groundbreaking project as a model for the B2B fashion portal of the future.
