Fashion E-Commerce in the 3D Digital Era : A 3D Interactive Web User Interface for Online Products

Abstract: Fashion brands have always been avant-garde in embracing new technologies and new formats of retail business models. The rapid development in 3D digital technologies, including 3D scanning, 3D modelling and 3D web rendering, have brought many new opportunities to the fashion industry, especially in shaping the future fashion e-commerce. The traditional 2D user interface and 2D media content have limited ability of displaying every detail of a product in full 360 degree, and the color accuracy of products in pictures is also a common problem. This thesis focuses on how to use 3D technologies to enhance the brand identity and  to reduce return rate, by designing and implementing a web 3D user interface for fashion e-commerce. An interactive 3D product user interface were designed and used for test. The results presented the pros and cons of the designed 3D user interface, and evaluated to what extent can this approach help to solve the brand identity problem and the high return rate issue for fashion e-commerce. It turns out that indeed the 3D user interface is rich in detail storytelling and the product accuracy can be improved by using the Physically Based Rendering technology and dynamic virtual lighting environments. However, the results also indicate that there are still lots of technical constraints for developing the virtual showrooms and the 3D user interface.