Feature

Patently sensible

It’s a bit blurry because it’s a prototype, but a German company called Neochroma is working on this attachment that enlarges mobile phone screens to the size of a desktop monitor. It’s going to be cheap, because it uses plastic for parts and lenses and it relies on the mobile phone display to render the image in stereoscopic 3D. Neochroma hopes to get the device to market within two years.
And Sony Ericsson has filed a US patent application for “a method for virtual apparel fitting” which involves “allowing transmission of an identification code for an article of apparel from a mobile wireless communications device directly to a virtual apparel fitting system; allowing transmission of one of a 3-D body model, a 3-D body model identifier or a set of body measurements from the communications device directly to the virtual apparel fitting system; and presenting a virtual representation of the article of apparel applied to one of the 3-D body model, another 3-D body model corresponding to the 3-D body model identifier, or a further 3-D body model generable from the set of body measurements, wherein the virtual representation of the article of apparel applied to one of the 3-D body models is presentable in response to receiving the virtual representation from the virtual apparel fitting system”.

Or, to put it another way, it’s a method of seeing how well the clothes fit you without trying them on. A bit of software on your phone lets you enter your weight, height, waist size, age and hair colour into the phone (or you can read it from a handy 3D scanning kiosk that takes an accurate virtual model of your body). Then you go shopping and look for clothes that carry a matching identification tag, coded with the item’s size, style and colour. You enter that code into the phone, and a screen in the store will display a picture of you wearing the items.