
Venturing into Fashion Tech
This podcast explores topics on fashion tech, entrepreneurship, and fashion business. Host Peter Jeun Ho Tsang looks at how technology is transforming the fashion industry by dissecting themes such as startup innovation, the evolution of fashion jobs and business culture, and the digitalisation of the fashion value chain. Joined by guest speakers from the fashion industry, startup world and wider business community, you’ll hear stories from founders, creatives, and executives to help shape your understanding of fashion tech. The show is recorded from Beyond Form, a fashion tech innovation platform that works with ambitious founders to build fashion tech startups. We’d love to hear your feedback, so please do let us know if you’d like us to explore a topic of conversation. You can email us on podcast@beyondform.io - If you’re an entrepreneur or a fashion tech startup needing a boost in your business journey, then check out our website: https://bit.ly/36qBPXR
Venturing into Fashion Tech
Dr. Huamin Wang: Why Style3D's Technical Research is Game-Changing for Digital Fashion
Dr. Huamin Wang's Research World
Picture the future of fashion on your screens, where virtual garments behave just like the real ones, thanks to the power of 3D simulation and GPU computing. That's the intriguing world we're exploring with Dr. Huamin Wang, Chief Scientist at Style3D, a pioneer in the digital fashion software space. We traverse through a captivating conversation, discussing the technology shaping the industry, the landscape of the global fashion design software market, and how Huamin's journey of cutting-edge research has brought him to the forefront of digital fashion.
Style3D's Next Technical Advancements in Digital Fashion
Ever wondered how artificial intelligence could revolutionize the digital fashion industry? With Huamin we take a closer look at the precision required to translate real fabrics into digital ones, how GPUs are improving accuracy and speed in the creation of digital fashion 3D assets, and the role of motion capture and simulation algorithms for the human body to effectively render in the digital realm.
Join us on this journey as we explore the path towards a more visually realistic and beautiful digital fashion landscape.
Find out more about Style3D: linctex.com
Visit the Style3D Linkedin Page
This episode has been created in paid partnership with Style3D.
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The show is recorded from Beyond Form, a fashion tech innovation platform. We build, invest, and educate fashion tech entrepreneurs and startups. We’d love to hear your feedback, so let us know if you’d like to hear a certain topic. Email us at podcast@beyondform.io. If you’re an entrepreneur or fashion tech startup looking for studio support, check out our website: beyondform.io
Hello, I'm Peter Jeun Ho Tsang, founder and CEO of Beyond Form. With digital fashion now a mainstay of the fashion industry, the real question is whether 3D simulation will ever be as realistic as a real physical garment. Dr. Huamin Wang, Chief Scientist at Style 3D, seems to think so. It's just a matter of time. In today's episode, I sit down with Huamin to talk about the advanced research that he and his research team are developing at Style 3D. From physics based simulation, or in other words, making sure that fabrics behave in digital as they should, what transitioning from CPU to GPU computing power will do for 3D design software, and how the fashion industry can capitalise on such advancements, not just the fashion designers.
Dr. Huamin Wang:How can we make the fabric look more realistic? It's fundamentally a computation problem. So we're trying to get more computation power from the best hardware we can get, and we realise that GPU is the one that provides such computation power. So we established our simulation engine, we built our software.
Peter Jeun Ho Tsang:So, if you're ready to step into Dr Wong's digital fashion research world, enjoy listening to this episode that we've created in paid partnership with Style 3D on venturing into fashion tech. How are you today, kwame? Good, how are you? I'm good, thank you. I'm looking forward to today's conversation. It's the first time we've had a doctor on the podcast show and for our listeners, I don't mean a medical doctor, but a research doctor. Kwame has a PhD in computer science and that's going to be a lot of the theme for today's topic talking about digital fashion and where it's really going in the future and you are the chief scientist at Style 3D, so it's going to be a very intellectual conversation, I imagine, for this episode. So I'm looking forward to it. But before we get into the conversation itself, I just want to give our listeners some context as to what's happening in the digital fashion space. So, in terms of the global fashion design software market, it's expected to reach a market value of $4.9 billion US by 2027. The compound annual growth rate is going to be 9.2% from 2020 to 2027, according to verified market reports. So it is growing and it's quite a sizable chunk as well. And, of course, style 3D sits within that portion of software.
Peter Jeun Ho Tsang:As we're recording this episode, it is the fashion month, so September, the digital fashion weeks are actually happening. So New York, london and Paris. The London leg just closed, which featured our very own portfolio of stars of outer world giving a talk about how the space is progressing. There's a lot of activity happening across the three capitals, which is great to see, because it has grown quite a lot, and quite quickly, since the digital fashion weeks actually started a couple of seasons ago. Although we've had exciting announcements from main players such as the fabricant and psyche this week during the digital fashion weeks, if you listen to our recent podcast episodes, the consensus is that there's a lot more opportunities to be taken, especially with advancing the software that creates digital fashion. The race is on to make assets even more life-like, and that is very much the premise of what we're talking about today. So, without further ado, huamin, tell us a bit about your journey, your story. How did you get to become the chief scientist at Style 3D?
Dr. Huamin Wang:Hello. Hi, my name is Huamin. I am a chief scientist at Style 3D, but before that I was a social professor at Ohio State University During my PhD. Since my PhD started, I started working on physics-based simulation and I become more and more interested in doing simulation of fabrics and garments when I was a postdoc. Part of the reason is because when I talked to my postdoc advisor, Professor James O'Brien, he's an Academy Award recipient and he founded the company called EverMetric. I'm not sure if you heard of this.
Peter Jeun Ho Tsang:No, what is it? Give us some context. What is that?
Dr. Huamin Wang:It's a similar company developing digital garments, but it was like many years ago and it was bought by Gerber. But basically he told me there are two major directions for research. One is about human face how do we animate human face, how do we model human face? Another one is about fashion. It's about how do we get the material properties of fabrics and how do we model garments. So I thought about these two directions and eventually I decided to choose fabrics and for garments. I'm still very happy today because I chose that direction.
Dr. Huamin Wang:Part of the reason is because simulation of garments and fabrics is a very, very difficult problem compared with the simulation of other materials in the world, and it's also so connected to the fashion industry. I think there's a huge opportunities for people in the graphic background to work with fashion people and eventually find the solution. So why do I join Stiles? Actually, I started working with fashion people starting in 2015 maybe, but I was still in the school. I just want to get some ideas about research, but I more worked with people.
Dr. Huamin Wang:I started to realize that there are so many important problems that needs to be solved, but for the people in the computer graphics background, they're not so interested in solving those problems. So I started working with people closer in this area a couple of years ago and met Eric. So Eric is the founder and also the CEO of Stiles 3D. So we had a conversation. I wasn't thinking about joining Stiles 3D back then, but from that conversation I started to know about Stiles 3D and it matched with my ambition to eventually, using simulation, using CG technology, to help transform the fashion industry, decided to join.
Peter Jeun Ho Tsang:How did he convince you? How did Eric was like, okay, I need to get Huaming on board. How did he convince you to?
Dr. Huamin Wang:join the company. It was very quick. Yeah, you know, I think it's probably it's just some synergy happening between us and I think I wasn't really thinking that SteoSweetie would be my choice because I was initially thinking that this is just going to be a software company developing, you know, some software for the fashion people. But from the conversation I realized that, you know, software is just the beginning. We're going to offer some solutions to the fashion people. We're also going to eventually connect fashion with the virtual world. But today we call it metaverse, but back then we just know that there's certain digital world, virtual world that people are going to live with and that may be the future of the, you know, the life form. And now the fashion is going to be very important also in the virtual world. So we're going to find such a solution.
Peter Jeun Ho Tsang:And then in terms of your research, when we think of you know, digital design, fashion design we don't necessarily think of a chief scientist and a PhD and specifically in your case, you were researching into physics based simulations. For our listeners that's probably like a completely different world. What does that mean specifically and why do you think that's important to bring that knowledge into a country like style 3D?
Dr. Huamin Wang:So simulation- a lot of time. We're talking about the motion, we're talking about the animation and the physics based simulation means that we use physics to guide the motion of objects. So for garments and for fabrics. This is very important because in the real world we can see the garments and fabrics. They're very deformable. It moves and it deforms, it bends, and also when the body moves, the garments moves with the body. So when we use simulation technology, we basically use the simulation to guide the motion of fabrics so that it can move, it can drip on the body, it can also move together with the body and using the simulation we're able to realistically recreate digital garments in the digital world. So that's why we need to solve research problems in that direction and it's actually probably some of you might know.
Dr. Huamin Wang:Simulation is also used in a lot of engineering areas, for example mechanical engineering, civil engineering, computational physics. People also use simulation. But fashion is very different, because fashion garments are very, very deformable. It's not like a bridge or an airplane. It doesn't really deform that much. If it deforms it fails. But for garments it's very soft, it's very deformable. So the simulation problem is quite different. I'm not sure if you heard of the word called nonlinearity.
Peter Jeun Ho Tsang:No, what is that? It sounds very difficult to understand.
Dr. Huamin Wang:Well, so nonlinearity means that object, so maybe it's not a very precise description, but basically that it means that it deforms too much, so the behavior of the deformation becomes nonlinear. So when the deformation is very little you can use some linear model to approximate the motion, and that was happening in the engineering field. But for simulation, for the digital garments, we are dealing a lot of those so-called nonlinear problems. Because it deforms too much, we have to use different techniques to do the simulation, and that opens a very new area for research.
Peter Jeun Ho Tsang:And so, if I understand correctly, because the very nature of textiles and for our listeners that are dealing with fashion products, designers and point developers, they just know this order too well that what you think of fabric or how it can behave in real life is completely different, or potentially completely different as to how it may actually turn up in the final sample in terms of fit, silhouette. Hang on all of those different attributes. So we're essentially trying to apply the same thinking into the virtual world, trying to compensate for all of those potential outcomes that we don't necessarily know until we've actually prototyped the digital garment itself. Is that correct?
Dr. Huamin Wang:Yeah, yeah. And also I would like to say that the simulation of government, simulation of fabrics, is probably the most difficult simulation problem, among others.
Peter Jeun Ho Tsang:So you are dealing with the most difficult part of design, then, for 3D assets. Well, that's off to you, kwame. So, on that note, so you lead the research team at Style 3D. Specifically, what does your team do within the company then?
Dr. Huamin Wang:So, the team we have. Actually we have three teams, three research teams. So one is the engine team. This is a team responsible for developing a simulation engine using state-of-the-art techniques, and we publish papers, we file patterns. We're basically incorporating new research into our products. We have a second team, we call it the metaverse team, but basically we're trying to explore the use of our engine, the use of our technology, into different environments, because eventually, when you create the digital government, how are we going to use it? So we're supposed that the fashion wants to use the government in maybe some epic, unreal or maybe unity or maybe some other environments. We provide those features for them to use in different environments. And then we have the AI team, responsible for developing everything empowered by AI technology For example, using AI to do design, using AI to help people create those digital garments.
Peter Jeun Ho Tsang:And then do all of these different teams work together as your research team, or they're very much settled off? How does these different teams contribute to the overall outcomes of Style 3D?
Dr. Huamin Wang:Well, they work together very, very closely. They also work very closely with our production team Because eventually, once you develop the engine, once you develop the new technique, you want to see those techniques being used in the products. So they work very closely with the production team, and a lot of time they have to have a lot of conversations making sure that this is the actual technique used for by our clients, not just something that we come out from the brainstorming ideas.
Peter Jeun Ho Tsang:Yeah, absolutely, and you mentioned there that you actually file for paintants. So, if I understand correctly, style 3D has over 50 proprietary intellectual property rights to specific elements. Can you dig a bit deeper into that?
Dr. Huamin Wang:Yeah, we have the patents. We have IPs from all kinds of directions. Mostly we're in the simulation-related patents, but nowadays AI is also a very big thing, like hopefully AI will also help the fashion. So we're also spending a lot of our research effort in AI and using. We're also finding AI-related patents as well.
Peter Jeun Ho Tsang:So it sounds like you're a proper AI believer. Then, for fashion, both, I think, yeah, both, because I know that conversations that I'm having, some people are still on the fence in regards to will AI be actually that useful for design and creators and so forth, but it sounds like you are very much a believer. Just going back to my introduction, the fabricant, the digital fashion house based in the Netherlands. They announced this week their partnership with Nvidia and integrating more AI into their solution and what they're doing. Do you think we're going to see more of that happening with the other digital fashion companies in the space?
Dr. Huamin Wang:I think so. I don't say AI would replace people in the fashion business. I would say AI would be very, very helpful. It will be co-piloting with fashion people in that direction. For all kinds of different roles in the fashion business, From designer, from the director, from buyers, for marketing people I think every role can benefit from the use of AI.
Peter Jeun Ho Tsang:So that's AI specifically going beyond fashion designers. Do you think digital fashion has potential to go beyond the role of the design and creative outputs?
Dr. Huamin Wang:Yeah, I think so. A lot of times, when people talk about digital fashion, they're mainly talking about creating the digital governments, 3d digital governments, but I think that's not really answer every question in the fashion business. The key question here is how we can use the digital governments further. If this is just a static digital government, the only application I can think of is just for virtual sampling, which helps the communication between a designer and a pattern maker, but this application is this is a good application, by the way, but it's quite limited.
Dr. Huamin Wang:The way I'm viewing this is that once you create the digital governments, there are many things that we can go from there.
Dr. Huamin Wang:For example, we can use the digital governments to create mixed match applications for buyers, for decision makers, to decide how we're going to place those governments in the showroom, how we're going to create a combination of those governments for one season. We can also go to the clients, to the marketing, for example people are thinking about. In the future, we can have the virtual trial applications for clients. So maybe this is not something we're going to achieve today, but eventually, maybe 10 years later, a virtual trial will be very common over the world. So we're trying to develop applications, we're trying to develop technologies going in that direction. Maybe not now, but eventually we will be there. So I don't really consider digital governments is just the digital governments. I think there's whole big pictures behind digital governments. There are all kinds of applications that digital governments is able to offer, but we're going to start from digital governments because that's the root, that's going to be the foundation of all kinds of different applications.
Peter Jeun Ho Tsang:So we're really thinking about the future of 3D assets and how it can be applied to different contexts in new cases. But just bringing it back to where digital fashion is right now, you mentioned earlier that it's still very difficult to simulate fabrics into 100%, truly simulate physical clothing, whether that's movement, fit, the properties of the fabric and so forth. Do you think it's actually technically possible to make it like a real life garment in 3D and do you think we will ever get there?
Dr. Huamin Wang:Well, technically this is possible. The real question is how long we're going to take right, and also we have to make a choice between computation and accuracy because, for example let me put it this way so for CG, for example, the main application is moving industry visual effects and they're able to afford spending hours or spending days just to do the simulation. But when we develop applications for fashion business, we can't really tell people that you're going to wait hours, of hours to see the simulation result. Right, we have to make a decision between the amount of computation time and the accuracy we're going to have, and this actually balance. This decision actually affects the accuracy of simulation a lot.
Dr. Huamin Wang:For example, one thing I can say the main problem with the simulation today is that the simulation model, or we call the mathematical model, is not so correct, and this is because we have to use simplified model to speed up the performance of simulation. But if you look at real fabrics, the real fabrics is very complicated. It's made of threads or yarns, you know, twisted into different complex structures and the fiber behaviors and how they collide, how they slide over each other. It's very complicated. Unfortunately, we're not able to have so complicated model for simulation to solve A lot of time. We just make simplifications so that we can simulate those garments fabrics within a reasonable time. So it's not really just an algorithm or the simulation problem. It's really a competition problem. Sometimes we have to make a balance between competition and accuracy.
Peter Jeun Ho Tsang:It's really about trying to find do you want to be a super technical product or do you want to be out there at the right moment so that there's enough users using your product? So it's a pure business question, I guess. But in terms of you mentioned their mathematics models. I'm sure that most of our listeners, when we think of digital fashion, they will necessarily think of maths. What have the two things got to do with each?
Dr. Huamin Wang:other. Yeah, so the mathematical. So don't be bothered by the term called mathematical. So mathematical just basically means that how are we going to describe the fabrics by math? Right? So a lot of popular models used by simulation is quite simplified. For example, we assume that the fabrics is made of a spring network. It's basically a lot of tiny little springs connected with each other and the deformation, the motion of the fabrics is determined by how much those springs stretch. Now this spring network can be generalized into something we call the continuum model. Basically means that the fabrics is a piece of rubber, but we know that the fabrics is not really a piece of rubber, it's really. It has very complicated woven or knitted structure. So you can see there's already a big difference between the model used by simulation and the real fabrics, the real fabric structure.
Peter Jeun Ho Tsang:So it's about trying to move away from that rubber, shall we say, and try to turn it into actual fabrics. Okay, I get it. I think it sounds very difficult. Just thinking about, then, style 3D and some of your other competitors in the market, which I'm sure we're all familiar with that's listening to this episode. You know one of the ways that you are potentially differentiating yourselves is the fact that you are moving away from CPUs to GPUs and ASTAR 3D. What does that mean?
Dr. Huamin Wang:specifically. Well, that basically means that we're trying to get better computation. So if you look at the hardware today, gpu is the performance, the computation power provided by GPU is getting bigger and bigger and compared with CPU. And we realize that simulation problem including, for example, realism how can we make the fabric looking more realistic is fundamentally a computation problem. So we're trying to get more computation power from the best hardware we can get and we realize that GPU is the one that providing such computation power. So we establish our simulation engine, we build our software.
Peter Jeun Ho Tsang:basically, on the GPU. And what is GPU? Specifically for those of us that are not techie, it's called graphics processing unit. Okay, and then if?
Peter Jeun Ho Tsang:I understand correctly, the GPU then allows style 3D to improve its accuracy and its speed, exactly yeah, amongst many things, of course, and just making the gummers look more beautiful. I imagine, and I guess from a visual perspective, it's going to allow us to be able to move down the virtual catwalk a lot more fluid, as if it were like a real-life human. I imagine which you know, I think we are there at the beginning just my personal opinion, but I don't necessarily think here that the movements are 100% accurate or those slight nuances that a real-life model might do with her hand on the hip or the tail of her head or the way she might turn around or he might turn around, for example, on the catwalk. It's still very like a robot, almost just because it is those predetermined movements, I imagine the GPU can allow us to be able to move more nuanced in the movement. Is that correct?
Dr. Huamin Wang:Well, there are many things we can improve. One thing is to use better motion capture device, for example. Those motion human motions are a lot of time they're motion captured and the reason we cannot get this so natural is because, you know, sometimes they're not dressed in the proper way. So we need a better motion capture device so for us to capture the motion more accurately. But also we need simulation algorithms for the human, because human is not a robot, it's not a rigid body. Right, we have soft tissues, we have skin, we have muscle, and when the body moves, those body parts are also deforming. So we also need simulation algorithms to simulate the body, together with governments, to make them more realistic.
Peter Jeun Ho Tsang:Of course, the real thing that we all want to work towards is being to make it as real as possible, I guess, so that we do have those virtual catwalk. You mentioned earlier the metaverse. I think one of the downfalls of the fashion metaverse at the moment is that it still looks quite rudimentary in some ways, especially if we think back to some of the activations from the past few seasons. It still looks like, you know, a video game from the 2000s type of thing, and although it looks nice and it's open and got a whole conversation, I think we need to move beyond that now. And I think one of the things there that is interesting for style 3D is that, although you're talking about this very forward thinking, hard tech, advancements in technology, I think one of the beauties that I understand is that it doesn't necessarily require the user to have a very high end or a high spec setup. Is that correct?
Dr. Huamin Wang:It depends. But you know, one thing I would say is that GPU is getting more and more affordable nowadays. So when we say high end, you know tomorrow it will become middle end or maybe low end. So compared with CPU especially. So today we're going to have a reasonable GPU to do the simulation and tomorrow, you know, they will be much, much more affordable.
Peter Jeun Ho Tsang:And then you mentioned earlier that when we're thinking of digital fashion, we don't necessarily need to think of just the digital fashion designer. It can move beyond. You know that creative element. How do you think the different roles within fashion is going to be used and how are they using style 3D, for example, with some of the daily tasks?
Dr. Huamin Wang:So one thing we're more specifically interested in today is about the mix match application. I briefly talked about this before, but we're aiming at buyers and directors. When they see digital garments, they don't just see an individual piece of digital garment. They really want to see how those digital garments can be combined together to form a combination, to form a set for the human body. For this application, we're specifically exploring how you know how people can interact with the simulation to change different garments, go from one one combination to another combination, so he or she can quickly browse over different combination choices. So I think that's a very interesting application for different roles in the fashion business. And then we also explore the virtual showroom application. When we have the showroom, we can have those garments placed in the showroom and you can also intact with different choices.
Peter Jeun Ho Tsang:So it's very much about creating that whole ecosystem. Then, in terms of 3D assets and how can it plug in into the different departments of the fashion industry, which I think is super interesting, because it then shows to us that we're still really only at the start with digital fashion and there's just so much more to be explored. So, in terms of some of your clients just to name a couple so we have Decathlon, china, so obviously Decathlon comes from France, so it's a massive brand sportswear. Another Italian brand that you work with is called Great Escapes, which is a sportswear brand from Italy, and you are working with some of the industry's luxury brands as well, so you have a healthy client list, shall we say, that are exploring with your research team. What has been some of the feedback so far about what you're doing in this space?
Dr. Huamin Wang:I think this is a very mutual experience for us, Like one thing we learned from the fashion business for fashion brands is that the realism at this stage is very, very important. How do we improve the realism? How do we make sure that the garments are realistic? Especially when we compare the virtual garments with real garments, we want to make sure that they look sufficiently realistic. We do not realize that this is such an important problem before, because for CG like my background is what's in CG. For CG, realism means that we just have to make it look nice, but we do not necessarily mean that this is 100% accurate compared with real garments. So this is one lesson we learned from fashion people and we actually are very dedicated to solve this problem. Right now we actually have a whole team trying to study the difference between real garments and virtual garments and how can we improve those.
Dr. Huamin Wang:Another thing we learned is that performance is also very, very important. We're very glad that we have the GPO simulation. We're able to do simulation very efficiently, but for some, and actually for many applications, the performance today is still not good enough. It's still not very, very close to real time yet for high quality, high resolution simulation. So we're exploring opportunities so that we can improve the performance for future applications. This is one of the reasons a lot of applications are not still there yet and also a lot of brands are very interested in AI. I think I talked about this.
Peter Jeun Ho Tsang:I think everyone's interested in AI right now. It's such a hot topic.
Dr. Huamin Wang:It's so busy, but AI means a lot, a lot of different things for fashion people AI, gc, for example, ai content generation a lot of time people talking about design because we can use AI to create nice pictures and this can help designer come up with new ideas. But AI can also mean a lot for digital garments, for example. Today, when we talk about digital garments, we need a lot of learning curve experience. You have to learn how to use the software. It takes a lot of time to learn how to make digital garments look nice and improve the result. But maybe AI once we have the AI and AI is good enough we can use AI to help simplify this process. For example, we don't have to design everything using software A lot of time. We can use AI to facilitate this design experience. So this is also something we're also exploring. Maybe in the future, everybody can use digital garments without actually learning how to use them. I think that's quite a person.
Peter Jeun Ho Tsang:We were just having a conversation before we were recording this episode. Although a lot of fashion designers do see the importance in digital fashion, they are sometimes having a hard time to transition into the digital realm. I think it is down to the fact that there is still that question mark about real versus digital, that performance element that you just mentioned. I think, as you guys are advancing this space, the more advanced it will be. I think it's going to help to convert more people into digital fashion, which I think is quite exciting. So then, on that note, then Kwan Min, what is the future of 3D rendering and digital fashion, and how does style 3D fit into that picture? Well, there are big pictures for both.
Dr. Huamin Wang:There's a big picture for CG, for animation, for computer graphics. That future, I would say eventually, is going to be the metaverse In the future of digital world. Everybody is going to be dressed, there will be fashion, there will be virtual fashion in the virtual world, just like what happens in the real world, and in that space, simulation graphics technology, the ability to model garments, the ability to simulate garments and also ability to transfer real fashion into virtual fashion, will be the key to the metaverse. I'm not entirely sure, like we're not entirely sure, what the metaverse is going to be, but we believe that such transition is going to happen, and so we're trying to provide tools, we're trying to develop algorithm techniques to make that happen. So that's the future for 3D rendering.
Dr. Huamin Wang:There's also the future for fashion. I think digital garments is only the beginning of the future. The future of garments is only the beginning for the digitalization of the garments, the fashion industry. There will be a lot of applications mixed match applications, virtual trial and also virtual showroom and their AI powered applications. There are all kinds of applications for the fashion industry that the fashion can benefit from digital garments. So I would say the software is really just the beginning.
Peter Jeun Ho Tsang:So it sounds like you think we're all going to be spending a lot of time in the metaverse then. So eventually we're all going to need a metaverse closet, Is that correct?
Dr. Huamin Wang:Well, maybe yeah maybe just like this, but when you buy the game you have all kinds of different skills.
Peter Jeun Ho Tsang:Exactly how much time do you spend in the metaverse Guam?
Dr. Huamin Wang:Not that much yet, but I played a lot of games back then. But who knows what the metaverse is going to be right?
Peter Jeun Ho Tsang:Absolutely. I just want to finish off this episode with a quick fire round of questions. So the first answer that comes into your head are you ready? Yeah, sure, the last 3D garment that you designed.
Dr. Huamin Wang:Well, I had a downcoat, and I also designed a bra dress.
Peter Jeun Ho Tsang:Okay, so two very different items there. Which is harder to do, the down or the bra dress?
Dr. Huamin Wang:They're both very hard, but from different perspectives yeah.
Peter Jeun Ho Tsang:Your favorite 3D fashion research output to date.
Dr. Huamin Wang:Well, I did very early, like back in 2011, I did a research about measuring fabric mechanical properties. That was 2011. It's still the leading research today, unfortunately, but hopefully we can come up with even better solutions.
Peter Jeun Ho Tsang:More is coming soon. Stay tuned, everyone. So one fashion Brian you'd like to work with. Well, I want to work with LVMH Of course you do. Everybody wants to work with LVMH, digital or physical first. I would say physical first. Do you know what that's interesting? Because everyone I've ever asked that question to they always go physical first. She's interesting. And then, finally, one tip for any newcomer to 3D fashion.
Dr. Huamin Wang:Well, I think it will be very helpful for people to learn a bit about CG, because my background is CG. There's a lot of similarity between CG and digital fashion and I think the boundary between these two is going to be less and less clear. I think eventually for digital fashion, for fashion, there will be some merge happening between these two.
Peter Jeun Ho Tsang:So is the point here that to make it easier for digital fashion, potentially go experience or get some skills in CG first? Is that correct? Yeah, they're very similar. Ok, that's good advice. Thank you very much for your time, Poimine. Thank you.