Walmart introduces virtual fitting room feature so customers can try on clothes from home — but it requires stripping down to your underwear or tight-fitting clothing to use
- "Be Your Own Model" is Walmart's next phase of personalizing the online clothes shopping experience.
- The retail giant acquired virtual try-on platform Zeekit in 2021.
Walmart is offering consumers a more intimate online shopping experience via a virtual try-on tool that allows users to see how clothes look on their own bodies.
The new feature — which launched on Thursday to iOS users on the Walmart app — comes after the retail giant acquired virtual fitting room startup Zeekit in 2021. In March, Walmart debuted its "Choose My Model" technology, which allows customers to choose between 50 models of varying sizes to see how clothes fit on a body similar to theirs.
Now in its next phase, "Be Your Own Model," users can try on more than 270,000 items on their own bodies — but they'll be required to strip down to underwear or tight-fitting clothing first in order for the feature to work accurately.
"This experience allows customers to use their own photo to better visualize how clothing will look on them, and creates a gamification of shopping that we believe will be very compelling to the customer," Denise Incandela, Walmart's executive vice president of apparel and private brands, said in a statement.
More modest users still have options. In the Walmart app, users can decide whether they'd like to see clothes on a model of their choice or become a model themselves, according to an explainer video from the company.
Unlike prior technology that would lay a photo on top of another for virtual try-ons, Walmart says "Be Your Own Model" uses algorithms and machine learning to simulate a more realistic fit.
"Walmart is the first to offer a virtual try-on experience for apparel brands at scale, and it's the most realistic application I have seen," Incandela said.
Walmart is the latest retailer to jump on the virtual try-on trend. In August, Amazon launched an augmented reality service that allows customers to try on shoes virtually, and other retailers like Macy's and Adidas have also previously worked with Zeekit to experiment with virtual reality.