Augmented reality app lets you see through catalog models' clothing

Here's an unlikely recipe for successfully spicing up a winter clothes catalog - make the models lose their clothes, or to be more exact, allow your clients to see what is hiding underneath the bulky winter garments. The X-Ray augmented reality app by clothing retailer Moosejaw does exactly that. It uses your mobile device's camera and some augmented reality trickery to grant you X-ray vision, as you scan both female and male models' bodies in the catalog. All you have to do is position your device over the catalog pages.

Augmented reality is a versatile technology. It can make a car trip more enjoyable and interactive, it can help you repair your BMW and it can revolutionize the way you interact with your surroundings. Oh, and it can be used to see what other people look like in their undies.

Of all the different fields augmented reality is being applied to, it is marketing that has allowed the technology to really take root, and Moosejaw's ingenious application provides another proof of its effectiveness. Seventy-five thousand downloads in five weeks, one million impressions on Twitter and 160,000 video views - these numbers from MarxentLabs, the maker of the app, speak for themselves. Most importantly, however, the application contributed to a 37 percent boost in sales compared with the same period a year earlier.

Although this is perhaps unlikely, we do hope that the success of Moosejaw's X-Ray app is going to serve as a signal to all the marketing managers out there that interactive advertising is better than unsolicited advertising (no matter how well targeted it is). At the same time, we pray that the idea of augmented reality-powered X-ray scanning is going to remain constrained to winter clothing catalogs, and we will never see it ported to one of these things.

The app is available for iPhone, iPad and Android devices and can also be used to interact with an online version of the catalog available on Moosejaw's website. See the video below for instructions.

Source: Mashable