The Gateway Into the Digital Fashion Metaverse: Frontier.cool Shines at the 2021 World Digital Textile Forum
The first-ever World Digital Textile Forum came to a close last week. This four-day event — held online — brought together global business leaders and experts from the fashion world to share opinions, insights, predictions, and set the new standards for the digital textile industry.
The keynote speakers and panelists of the 2021 World Digital Textile Forum
As we know, the global textile industry is undergoing significant changes as it embraces and leverages new digital textile trends such as sustainable alternative materials, 3D design, technology-driven functional smart manufacturing processes, and the adoption of digital textile technologies.
While we’re not trying to “reinvent the wheel,” we can unquestionably recognize that by adopting these new approaches, the textile industry can become an innovator with an integrated value chain, concentrating on high-quality, eco-friendly, and cost-efficient materials.
The imminent digital transformation will reduce pollution and inventory by developing a greener approach to the on-demand manufacturing (ODM) process — facilitating the goal of waste mitigation, no returns, less shipping, and net-zero carbon emissions in the future.
The 2021 World Digital Textile Forum certainly helped spread the word that the digital textile metaverse is forming right before our very eyes and that the big bang of the digital textile industry is already upon us. Moreover, the engagement from the audience and the questions posed to the keynote speakers and panelists were indicative of the most common and significant concerns of designers, brands, and the supply chain as a whole.
Frontier.cool’s CEO, Victor Chao, was a keynote speaker on day one, he also joined the panel discussion on days one and four of the event. We’d like to take the opportunity to share some of Frontier.cool’s highlights from day one with you.
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The Big Bang of the Digital Textile Industry
Victor began his keynote session by highlighting that last year, almost half of all apparel sales were made online and that this trend will continue indefinitely.
Source: U.S. Department of Commerce
Victor then explained that as e-commerce is so colossal, it has a gravitational pull for online applications, such as Virtual Fitting — to lower apparel return rates — and Digital Product Creation — for placing digital apparel on Virtual Fitting avatars. “Brands of all sizes want to get involved and merge into the universe via their digital workflows — along with their suppliers, and once the entire workflow is part of the metaverse, we can create environmentally friendly, cost-effective, and speedy products.”
Frontier.cool certainly is the gateway into the fashion metaverse.
Victor then went on to showcase the impressive Frontier.cool platform: TextileCloudTM and the mechanics behind it. It’s quite incredible when you think about it, with Frontier.cool, anyone with a regular office scanner and an internet connection can utilize this groundbreaking technology. Long gone are the days of outsourcing to a lab, or having to purchase expensive equipment to generate 3D materials. In less than half a minute, the user — regardless of their background — can transform a 2D fabric image into a 3D material, which can then be downloaded as a U3M file, ready for use.
The Frontier.cool way
After impressing the audience with the capabilities of the 3D Viewer and 3D Fabric Creator, Victor then hinted that — thanks to the TextileCloudTM — we are now able to scale like never before.
This statement is very important as digitization at scale, from anywhere in the world, in less than 30 seconds, is going to revolutionize the fashion industry for designers, brands, and textile mills. Frontier.cool mitigates the costs and time involved when compared to traditional fabric shipping processes. Not only that, once the entire supply chain begins to embrace and adopt digitized textiles, the environment will be positively impacted.
It’s worth noting that the AI engine behind Frontier.cool’s 3D Fabric Creator has just had a massive upgrade, you can read more about what this development means for the industry here.
Frontier.cool’s 3D Viewer in action
During the panel discussion, an audience member eagerly asked Victor the following question:
How does Frontier.cool help brands and suppliers to enter this metaverse smoothly, and what is this metaverse, exactly?
Many people think of the metaverse as a virtual world parallel to the real world, but we think of the metaverse as more of a hybrid of the virtual world and the real world, where the lines are blurred and blend together.
Imagine this, I can have a “digital twin” in the metaverse that can try on a digital dress that a brand designer has made for me, and after I try it on virtually, and once I'm happy with it from every angle, I just press a button to then receive a physical dress a few days later that looks just like the one my virtual twin has.
For the textile industry to perform that, the digital clothes and their digital materials and components could stream between different applications and stakeholders. Moreover, they can be certifiable in the virtual space. For example, a piece of digital clothing has an order placed for manufacturing; all of its digital materials and components can be located in the physical world through public key certificates.
Frontier.cool helps brands and supply chains to do digital streaming, which extends to both e-commerce and virtual wear by using AI to digitize at scale. Therefore, Frontier.cool is both the fabric portal and the core gateway to the fashion metaverse.
Keep a lookout for our next article, which will cover Frontier.cool’s contribution to days two and four of the 2021 World Digital Textile Forum.
On day two — Jump-Start 3D Design Innovation — Frontier.cool’s CSO, Wayne Fan joined the lively panel discussion along with Sharon Lim of Browzwear, Amnon Shalev of Virtuality.Fashion, and Renate Eder of Vizoo.
Day four — Digitization in Fashion — saw Victor Chao return to offer a summary of the entire event, along with a forecast for the future of the digital fashion metaverse, and the industry as a whole.
We hope you’ve enjoyed this first installment of the 2021 World Digital Textile Forum highlights. We’re looking forward to next year’s event already! To access the full recordings, simply fill out the form below.
Full recordings from the 2021 World Digital Textile Forum