Bridget Dolan and her team at Sephora’s Innovation Lab, based in San Francisco, were a year into developing a new virtual reality tool for the retailer’s mobile app when the technology used to power the experience saw a breakthrough.
“When it comes to augmented and virtual reality, it can only be successful if it’s truly useful,” said Dolan, Sephora’s head of innovation. “We weren’t interested in just buzzy. A lot of things like technical accuracy and timing had to come together, and there was a time last year when, during testing, we hit a tipping point.”
Sephora’s team and its technology provider, augmented reality platform ModiFace, had pushed facial recognition technology to a new point of sophistication. After months of development, the technology can break down one virtual makeup application into a step-by-step layering process, while maintaining critical accuracy and reaching mass scale.
More in Marketing
How Bloom Nutrition is expanding internationally
Bloom Nutrition is launching in multiple foreign markets that include Australia, France and the U.K.
Fears of Big Tech bias underpin debates around W3C’s Attribution API
Critics may label the initiative as ‘Privacy sandbox 2.0,’ but advocates counter with privacy arguments.
Why agencies are taking a hybrid approach to synthetic audience research
Synthetic audiences are moving beyond AI experiments as agencies weave them into market research and client services.