Acquisition of customer’s tailor measurements for 3D clothing design using virtual reality devices

ABSTRACT

Over recent years, various virtual prototyping technologies have been developed to innovate apparel industry. For each step of the garment design process one can find dedicated tools (from body acquisition to garment modelling and simulation) with the aim of making the process easier and faster. However, most of them are based on expensive solutions both for hardware and software systems. In this paper, we focus the attention on the first step of the made-to-measure garment design, i.e. customer’s measures acquisition. We present a plug-in, named Tailor Tracking, which permits to get the measurements by interacting with the customer’s avatar using hands as in the traditional way. Tailor Tracking has been developed using low cost devices, such as Microsoft Kinect sensor, Leap motion device and Oculus Rift, and open source libraries, such as Visualisation Toolkit (VTK) and Qt. The proposed approach is based on the use of multiple Kinect v2 to simultaneously acquire both customer’s body and motion. This permits to emulate the customer’s postures required to take the correct measurements. In addition, a virtual measuring tape is made available to replicate the one commonly used by the tailor. A men shirt has been considered as case study and a tailor and 14 people with no skills in garment design and different levels of experience in virtual reality technology have been involved to preliminary test Tailor tracking. Finally, tests as well as results reached so far are presented and discussed. Results have been considered quite good; however, some critical measures have been identified as well as future developments. Anyway, Tailor Tracking can represent an alternative solution to the existing approaches that automatically extract anthropometric measures from the customer’s avatar.

KEYWORDS:

• Clothing design
• garment measurements
• virtual reality
• Kinect sensors
• head mounted display
• hand-tracking device
• motion capture

Acknowledgements

The authors want to thank the Ministry of Economic Development (MISE), Italy, which co-funded this research with the Body-Scan project. The authors would like also to thank Marchetti Atelier for the precious collaboration and availability to provide us with all necessary information about garment design, especially men shirt.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Andrea Vitali http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9261-4357

Caterina Rizzi http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1779-5183

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Andrea Vitali

Ph.D. Andrea Vitali. Master’s degree in computer engineering received from the University of Bergamo in 2011. Since 2012, he carried out research activities relative to the development of virtual reality applications with augmented interaction for custom-fit products by means of interaction devices at low costs. He has much experience in 3D modelling software and computational geometry, his role is to use innovative ICT for developing innovative applications for virtual prototyping. Since 2017, he is Assistant Professor at University of Bergamo. Main research topics: Human Modelling, Virtual Reality, Additive Manufacturing, Reverse engineering techniques, IT for Health, IT for Fashion Industry, Computer Graphics and Software Development of 3D solutions.

Caterina Rizzi

Prof. Caterina Rizzi. Since 1985, she carried out research activities in the following research areas: Solid and surface modelling, Graphical user interface and related development tools, 3D CAD systems for automotive industry, Virtual prototyping and Virtual/Augmented Reality, Knowledge Based Systems, Physics-based modelling and simulation of non-rigid products; Virtual Ergonomics and Digital human modelling, Additive manufacturing, Eco-design, Systematic innovation; Intellectual Property Management; PDM/PLM systems to manage the product life-cycle applied in different industrial sectors, from Mechanics and Automotive to Textile-Clothing and Bio-engineering.