iART: Consumer-oriented ICT Solutions for creative SMEs providing Art in Bespoke Fashion

Abstract

The main objective of the iART project is to bring visual art into bespoke clothing so as to make apparel products more valuable compared to other garments in the market and to support artists to exploit their work. To reach this objective a set of innovative ICT solutions has been developed: (i) Upgrade of the configuration toolkit from 2.5D to 2.5D/3D by including shadowing and rotating features without the need of plug-ins and easy extension of the catalogue to clothing. (ii) Move to real-time online rendering (fabric draping), so as to speed up and increase the flexibility of the whole process from artist design over fabric creation to customized bespoke shirts and other garments (fabric rendering on 2.5D/3D clothing configurator). (iii) Building of a B2C platform enabling co-creation and user generated art content, and development of an Advanced Artist Interface (AAI) with artist cockpit. As iArt is built upon an existing B2C webshop for bespoke shirts (Bivolino.com), it will be replicable and so has the potential to create a wide impact.