The Next Big Things in Machine Learning Is Coming Sooner Thanks to Covid-19
By: Rionaldi Chandraseta
Tags: Artificial Intelligence, Technology, Machine Learning, Retail, Augmented Reality

Technology

The Next Big Things in Machine Learning Is Coming Sooner Thanks to Covid-19

Amazon and Apple already have a huge head start.

Photo by Clark Street Mercantile on Unsplash

Covid-19 has caused massive disruption to industries around the world. Airline and tourism were among the first ones to be hit hard due to entry restriction by most countries in an effort to curb the pandemic’s spread. Giant startups like Airbnb and Uber, among others, have also laid off some of their workers in an effort to shed expenses. Famous consulting firms, Accenture and Deloitte, did the same thing a couple of months ago. The list goes on and on.

Among these industries, there is one, in particular, that may usher in the next trend in machine learning and AI— the retail industry. The following headlines hint at why:

These global fashion companies have decided to close down physical stores and move their focus to online sales.

The main reason, aside from shopper’s reluctance to venture into public places, is staggering rents.

Take Singapore: when the “circuit-breaker” provisions went into effect — the national stay-at-home order—retail stores were closed. However, these stores still need to pay rent even though it could not operate.

Meanwhile, online retailers’ stock prices, such as Amazon and Sea Group’s Shopee, are rising sharply amidst the spread of Covid-19. Mostly because people who are staying at home can still do online shopping even during lockdowns.

The shift from companies having thousands of offline stores into focusing mainly on online sales is paving the way for retail AI.

What is retail AI?

Retail AI is essentially AI-related technologies that help the retail industry, from enhancing customer experiences, demand forecasting, inventory management, recommendation engines, chatbot, and so on.

AI for retail has been around for a while now, such as H&M using AI to manage inventory and Sephora’s Color IQ for personalized make up recommendations. However, with big companies shifting to online sales, new use cases for AI in retail will surely emerge.

New startups that specialize in providing retail AI solutions have also emerged, such as vue.ai and syte.ai.

However, there are two major players that have been preparing for this shift.

Amazon and Apple.

Amazon’s Outfit-VITON

Example of Outfit-VITON (source)

Amazon recently published a paper on CVPR 2020. CVPR stands for Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, it is by far the most prestigious conference un the field of image processing and computer vision. Outfit-VITON (Virtual Try-ON), as they called it, will let them generate an image of how a combination of various outfits may look on a particular model.

In other words, it would let users shop online and try on outfits virtually.

The paper shows a promising result, producing better images than the previous state-of-the-art models. However, we have yet to try it since Amazon has not released such a feature on its website at the time of writing this.

This technology may not be that accurate to help people choose their sizes for now, but it will help people to see how they would look like using a combination of clothes without having to go into physical stores.

In the near future, it may be possible for a machine learning model to recommend the size of outfit that will match you the best, or even recommending outfit style for you.

Oh, wait, Amazon already did that last one.

Apple’s Augmented Reality

Screenshot by Author from Apple (source)

Did you remember when Apple first released the Measure app and everyone with an iPhone posts Instagram stories and tweets about them?

Shortly after, the more critical people started questioning the accuracy of the app when they tried to measure the same object more than once and got different results.

But that is about to change with the addition of this component in Apple’s latest products. The LiDAR.

LiDAR stands for Light Detection And Ranging. It works by emitting laser to the environment and measuring the time it needs to bounce back into the sensor to calculate the distance of each point.

The sensor will give extra information about the depth to the device, which would greatly increase the distance perception needed for AR.

When Apple first announced iPad Pro with LiDAR sensors, the first thing that came to my mind is “Apple is really getting serious with AR.” With the release of iPhone 12 Pro with LiDAR, they are further confirming their intention to focus on AR in the coming years.

Screenshot by Author from GANs for Good video (source)

In the recent GANs for Good video, Ian Goodfellow explains how he and his team at Apple use GAN to enhance the user’s experience on AR. He explains that placing a shiny object that is supposed to have reflections on them is quite hard due to the fact that the camera could not see objects and environments outside of its point of view.

Their solution?

They use GAN, Ian’s creation back in 2014, to generate how the environment might look like and use it to help generate a more realistic reflection for the virtual object.

If a company is not serious about developing AR, having a special team with Ian Goodfellow as the director is not something they would do.

You can watch the part where Ian explains about how Apple use GAN to enhance their AR experience here.

Retail AI x Augmented Reality

So what will happen if we combine the power of retail AI and Augmented Reality?

Advertisement of IKEA Place by IKEA (source)

IKEA had developed IKEA Place using Apple’s ARKit to let its customers virtually place furniture inside their home through AR. This application is arguably easier than the one for online fashion retail, due to the fact that they do not have to take into account the dimension and body shape of people who would use the furniture.

IKEA Place is just one of the examples of what retail AI and AR can do together.

With the superior AR performance of LiDAR equipped iPhones, it will be far easier to achieve better results for retail AI that use image processing.

For example, having the exact measurements of a person will produce better product size recommendation rather than having to predict the measurement of said person from a flat image and dealing with the prediction errors.

Other use cases?

The first thing that comes to mind is using AR to superimpose a virtual interior design of a building to help the users better visualize living inside the new design instead of just seeing it through rendered pictures. Not just furniture though, imagine something that can superimpose 3D design to the current building.

An even more complicated AR use case is for beauty products and hairstyles. This would let users try on make-up, color their hair, and even switch their hairstyles using the help of machine learning.

L’Oréal collaborated with Modiface to make an app for styling your hair, but it was not… refined. I tried downloading the application to see how it works but it was very glitchy and hard to make it work. Since then, Modiface has been acquired by L’Oréal.

Last year, L’Oréal and Modiface has also teamed up with Amazon to let users virtually try make-up products while shopping through Amazon.

Final thoughts

The retail AI industry is growing rapidly, with syte.ai raising 22 million and vue.ai raising 17 million, both on their Series B funding. With big fashion companies such as Topshop, Zara, and H&M moving to online sales, the industry might be growing even more rapidly now.

Augmented Reality is still in the phase where it is considered as something high tech and fun to play with, but not something that most people want to use yet. Apple might change that.

They had a history of moving the market. Apple may not necessarily be the first-movers, but they are the one who actually make the masses want to use new technologies.

Take the iPhone and the Apple Watch for example. Touchscreen phones have been around for a while before Apple introduced the iPhone, but a lot of people still used Blackberry phones before that. Similar with Apple Watch, the smartwatch industry had existed long before Apple released theirs. However, not a lot of people wore one back then.

If history repeats itself, Apple could make Augmented Reality way more popular and mainstream when they release their AR Headsets and AR Glasses, which is rumored to be in the next couple of years.

These advancements in AR coupled with Amazon’s recent research to let buyers try on outfits virtually and a lot of popular clothing brands moving to online sales might be the spark that AR needs to make it trending.

We might see the adoption of retail AI and AR by companies in near future. Trying on outfits and other products online will greatly enhance the online shopping experience and might become a catalyst for fully online brands with no physical store.

One last thing, if, or when, the retail AI and Augmented Reality finally takes off, Amazon and Apple might become two of the biggest players with the head start they have right now.