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Ralph Lauren starts testing interactive fitting rooms in NYC
Ralph Lauren isn't afraid to experiment with new tech. Last year, the brand introduced a smart shirt for athletes, designed to measure performance with conductive silver threads and other tracking sensors. To add to this, Ralph Lauren's announced it will begin testing interactive fitting rooms at its Polo flagship store in New York City. These smart mirrors, created by a startup called Oak Labs, are capable of recognizing a customer's clothing pieces via RFID (radio-frequency identification) tags and displaying these on a large touchscreen. Once that happens, you can request different sizes and colors of items in your possession, which are then brought over to you by a Polo associate. From there you're able to keep trying on different looks or simply check out -- and if you don't speak English, there's support for Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Italian and Portuguese.
Polo Ralph Lauren offers literal window shopping
It's not unusual to see the latest and greatest fashions prepped up behind a huge glass pane when strolling by a retail clothing store, but the traditional idea of enticing customers to come in could be replaced by just handling transactions at the glass. Polo Ralph Lauren has unveiled a unique way to shop in at its stores, allowing customers to complete purchases by interacting with the glass window of the building, and is testing the idea at the flagship location in New York. While we've seen some fairly obscure ways to shop, picking up a new outfit by tapping on a huge window may take the cake -- a projector beams 67 inches worth of Ralph Lauren's latest threads onto the store's window, while a "thin touch foil" mounted on the glass powers the touchscreen. Apparently customers can shop around the clock (if you dare wander out on city streets at those odd hours of the night) by just tapping images of the clothing they want and swiping their credit cards on the wall-mounted card reader. The company plans to keep the display up and running through September 10th, after which a decision will be made based on its success (or lack thereof) to either nix the windows shopping experiment or introduce it into more stores. While we're unsure what makes waiting in an outdoor line to purchase items any less annoying than waiting inside, this may be the perfect way to exercise those impulse buying muscles, and hey, at least it gives window washers some steady work.[Via SmartMobs]
