Check it Out: E-Commerce Gets Real With Virtual Fitting Room

These features are powered by Fashionista, an augmented reality shopping app based on Zugara's motion capture work and available in RichRelevance's enRICH personalization platform. As part of that suite, Fashionista also provides personalized and crowd-sourced clothing recommendations.

All of that integrates with Tobi.com's one-to-one shopping experience, which uses one-on-one chats to give visitors the feeling of shopping in a real-world boutique with friends, trying on clothes advised by a living salesperson who knows their tastes and histories. The closer Tobi.com gets to the customer's experience of finding something new, getting excited, showing it to friends, screaming, dancing, whatever, the closer it gets to the sale.

Is it better than the real thing? No, not yet. I'm a big guy who never knows if click-ordered clothes are going to fit, and ideally I'd like a virtual fitting room to clear up that question. But Fashionista does give you a better, photo-realistic idea of how an item will look in the wild. In that sense, it takes several steps toward overcoming the barriers to selling personal gear to fickle customers without the benefit of retail locations.

If those barriers face your site, too, check Fashionista out.