fits.me robotic mannequins for virtual dressing rooms

with a plated exterior and mechanical ‘muscles’, the ‘fit-bot’ robot emulates thousands of different body shapes, useful for online shopping image © stina kase

with the female ‘fitbot’, fits.me biorobotics company has modeled the female form with a robotic mannequin whose artificial muscles can simulate the shape and size of hundreds of thousands of different body types.

last year, in partnership with britain’s hawes & curtis, the company opened the first ‘virtual fitting room’ for online clothing retailers, featuring a male ‘fitbot’ mannequin. it took a year of development to create the new ‘fitbot’, engineered using algorithms based on thousands of 3D human body scans.

the virtual fitting room asks the user’s height, chest/bust size, waist measurement, wrist-to-neck length, and torso type, as well as neck size (for men) or hip measurement (for women). the program recommends a fit size, and shows a photograph of the garment being worn by the ‘fitbot’ set to these precise proportions, to give users a better sense of how the clothing will look on their own frames. a small warning box alerts users to possible problems, such as sleeves that are too short, and shoppers may also view other sizes of the garment.

example view of the same dress worn by the model in a range of different sizes and body type configurations image © stina kase