Online shopping has skyrocketed during the pandemic, highlighting its usefulness and its shortcomings. Ordering merchandise is incredibly convenient until you need to know your size, for clothing and shoes. But Volumental aims to address this latest problem by soon launching a mobile app that allows iPhone 12 Pro owners to 3D scan their feet to recommend the correct shoe size every time. And while the Volumental mobile app will only be compatible with the iPhone 12 Pro and Pro Max when it launches in the coming months, it will be coming to older iPhones by the end of the year. The app isn't just for consumers, it's basically a mobile version of the proprietary foot scanner that Volumental has sold to high-end shoe retailers like Adidas, Allbirds, Bauer, Fleet Feet, Road Runner, The Athlete's Foot, and others to install. in their stores. Employees use the scanner, a gray whiteboard the size of a bathroom rug with four sets of cameras and sensors pointed at the center, to take detailed measurements of customers' feet, often as a query to sell fitted insoles and the right shoes. for your physiology. and movement patterns. And we wouldn't have the new mobile app without all the data generated by the retail scanners. "One of our strengths, and what sets us apart, is that so far we have digitized almost 10 million people around the world with our retail scanners, and we are present in 42 countries around the world," co-founder and director of Volumental technology Alper Aydemir told TechRadar, explaining that connecting all of this data to consumer purchases "allows us to really understand how each shoe fits and what type of fit best fits each shoe." And not just shoe types, but differences in shoe sizes, which can get bigger or smaller at irregular intervals; maybe going from a men's US 9 to a 9,5 is a smaller jump than going from a 9,5 to a 10, which is an inconsistency you wouldn't catch unless you had such a large data set. Consumers will benefit from all this data and scan their feet with their own phones when the Volumental mobile app launches in the coming months (scheduled for "summer" or later in Q2021 12). For starters, only owners of the latest iPhone 2021 Pro and Pro Max phones will be able to use the app thanks to its state-of-the-art LiDar and other sensors, but compatibility will open up to older iOS devices towards the end of 2022, and a version Android will follow after that, possibly in early XNUMX.
Standing scan with the latest iPhone technology
The Volumental mobile app uses advances in mobile phone augmented reality software to add AR markers to scans of a user's foot and then build a 3D model to compare against its database. Eventually the app will be open for all models, but they start with the most powerful iPhone on the market to refine the scanning software. "It has the best processor, it's the fastest, so it makes sense to start from there and get everything working really well before tackling everything else," Aydemir said. “That's what I've seen in my career, it's the best strategy: you make one thing work really well before trying to depend on different things at the same time. Before co-founding Volumental, Aydemir worked on Google's 3D mapping team for the Tango project, and also worked at NASA on their 3D scanning app for mobile phones. Their experience contributed to Volumental's decision to harness their mobile app, but not to rely on the iPhone 12 Pro's LiDar sensor, which allows the phone's ARKit software to find a surface to scan in depth much faster, but that it's not a common feature among fewer premium phones. In fact, Volumental had to develop its own version of ARKit (which is not actually designed to scan body parts) to stitch images that the iPhone takes with sub-millimeter precision into a 3D model of a foot, because if these positions of the camera are even a little off, said Aydemir, the model is not usable. Volumental's proprietary retail scanners generate a ton of data including foot size measurements, instep height, heel width, arch height and more, but the mobile app will focus on shoe size, which is the most important measure for consumers anyway. Currently, the mobile app can perform accurate scans within 5mm of error, or half the size of a US shoe. UU., For 90% of people who use the application. It may seem like a noticeable discrepancy, but it's much better for consumers to guess their shoe size across different brands, which contributes to dissatisfaction and product returns. In today's e-commerce, return rates can be as high as 50%, Aydemir said. The mobile app is designed to take the guesswork out of accessing the Volumental dataset and continue to expand it as consumers scan for new shoes and add them to the collective.