No two bodies have the same shape. It's a problem clothing manufacturers have historically had a hard time working around. The Cyberware Whole Body Scanner is addressing the issue of nonstandard body sizes by fitting clothes exactly to the wearer's body - without requiring anyone to get naked.
"Clothing sizes hanging on the rack just don't make much sense," says Steve Addleman, vice president of Cyberware. "We think there's a real market there - not just custom-made clothing, but also directing customers to clothes that will actually fit."
The technology, using software from Joseph Nurre of Ohio University and a body scanner from Cyberware, is similar to that currently being used at your local supermarket checkout - except that the scanner is a 10-foot cube. Using a laser scanner and four cameras that sense how light diffuses around the body, the Whole Body Scanner will take the exact measurements of a human in 17 seconds - capturing and distinguishing among a hefty 1 million data points.
The military has been quick to jump on the technology, and is implementing it for uniform fitting. When a soldier's body is scanned by the Cyberware program, the measurements are translated to a clothing size; if those measurements don't exist in standard clothing sizes, the scanner will immediately send the data to a factory that cuts a custom-made uniform within minutes. The Air Force has been using an older version of the scanner program for 12 years, to accurately fit protective equipment to the pilot's heads.
Cyberware isn't the first to see the potential market for custom clothing software: Levi's Personal Pair program tailors jeans to a customer's exact size using the basic measurements that customers input into a computer. The StyleSelect bathing suit database offers a similar service, using measurements to digitally display bathing suits on a body type corresponding to customer data.
Real-world clothes aren't the only potential market: Addleman envisions a VR future in which gamers will carry disks of their body scans and plug them into VR machines as a personal avatar for networked games.
But so far, only four of the scanners (which cost US$400,000 each) are in use on military bases and a VR arcade in Japan. As a small company, Cyberware first needs fashion-industry partners before it can break into the retail industry.
Says Addleman, "Just renting a space at the local mall would kill us."
