‘What a wonderful world we live in, where technology means you can infinitely customise and play with the way you look and the way the world perceives you.’
– Rachel Barrie, Junior Creative Technologist,
Solarflare Studio
For this year’s Breast Cancer Now’s Wear it Pink day on 21 October, the studio decided to get creative with how we use technology for good, styling all pink augmented reality outfits.
BREAST CANCER AWARENESS
Each year in the UK, there are around 55,000 new cases of breast cancer in women. The breast cancer survival rate has doubled in the last 40 years, but it is only as a result of raising money for the research through events and fundraisers like these.
Breast Cancer Now‘s Wear it Pink day is one of the biggest fundraising events in the UK. Taking place on 21 October during Breast Cancer Awareness Month, thousands of amazing people will wear it pink in their communities, schools, or workplaces, to help make life-changing research and care happen. Over the past year, people have been diagnosed with the disease at a time when everything from treatment to screenings have been disrupted.
Want to explore the possibilities of new technologies? Get in touch to explore ideas.
Want to explore the possibilities of new technologies? Get in touch to explore ideas.
ALL PINK DRESSX GARMENTS
For our fundraising event, instead of wearing physical pink clothing to the office, we thought this would be a great opportunity to try out some AR fashion and raise awareness towards such an important cause. Using the DressX app we tried on some of their pink AR garments and experimented with how well they tracked to our bodies. DressX is an app that allows creatives to post their digital fashion garments for people to try and purchase. You can either buy a subscription to the app which allows you to do a virtual try-on and post to social media, or you can buy the garments as NFTs.
AR FASHION
We did notice that there wasn’t a large variety of traditional menswear – does AR fashion have a gender problem? There were no gendered sections on the app, perhaps making the gender of the clothing ambiguous was the aim – alas, these are thoughts for a blog post another day. Today we want to purely focus on the technology. The digital quality of the garments varied, and we found that the garments with the most amount of detailing actually looked the best and tracked to the body most seamlessly, whereas the simple pink T-shirt glitched the most. Perhaps with such simplicity error is easily noticeable. One other recurrent glitch was the way hands were integrated into the garment movement – especially if there were sleeves, the app would sometimes fail to identify which part of the garment was supposed to be on top of the other.
Accessibility of digital fashion has come a long way in the last few years, with applications like DressX and The Fabricant becoming widely used within the creative tech industry. However, with paywalls in place for the key software used to create these digital garments, such as Clo3D and Marvelous Designer, there is a barrier for the average tech and fashion enthusiast to get involved. With this component of interactivity and collaboration absent, the digital generation that grew up customising their avatars in games is missing. We believe for digital fashion to really take off, creative control needs to be given to the audience so that they can feel connected and a part of the magic.
FUNDRAISING
The studio donated on behalf of each team member who rocked an AR outfit, be it pink T-shirt or dragon cape. We hope you will join us and donate to the Breast Cancer Now organisation so that vital research and support can continue to those that need it most. You can find the link to our Just Giving page below. If you want to do things differently, drop us a message!
We’re always looking to expand our network of creative collaborators, from technical specialists to people that work in more traditional art forms. LAUNCH exists to blend the barriers between creative practices and new tech. Get in touch to explore ideas.
