Hyperconnected consumers expect to interact with retailers through multiple channels simultaneously.

Technology is changing the way consumers shop for fashion through social media apps, retail shops, digital dressing rooms and augmented reality. Consumers now expect an integrated and consistent digital experience across platforms when they go online to browse, research and buy goods.

Fashion Capitals Go Digital

While couture fashion hubs have long been in New York, Paris, London and Milan — Instagram and TikTok are now setting the fashion agenda, with Instagram becoming a store window display and TikTok furthering the conversation. Technology has disrupted the traditional fashion power structure centered around Fashion Week. Instead of limiting the introductions to elite editors, buyers and stylists — many are taking their fashions directly to new pipelines making the merchandise in their runway shows readily shoppable. Influencers can buy the collections online and in stores the same day they were shown on the runway instead of the usual six-month lag. Social media also is democratizing fashion by enabling younger and smaller designers to directly connect with followers and new audiences.

“Smart” Wardrobes

It’s more than smart watches or what you wear on your wrist. Technology in fashion is becoming more pervasive. Digitally-enabled fabrics, with IoT capabilities are expected to become big business as new multi-material fibers reveal new applications.

Gaming and The Direct-To-Avatar Model

The fashion world was recently abuzz with news that Balenciaga and Fortnite teamed-up for a multi-tier partnership. Included are Balenciaga outfits for Fortnite players, a physical Balenciaga collection inspired by the game’s Retail Row, a virtual Balenciaga store and billboards featuring gamers, and behind-the-scenes videos on how it came together. It’s Fortnite’s first luxury fashion collaboration and a sign that fashion and the metaverse are getting cozier. Prior partnerships with the same cross-category linkup include Louis Vuitton x League of Legends in 2019 and Gucci x Roblox earlier this year.

This is big news because 50% of Fortnite’s 400 million global players are spending their time in Fortnite, allowing them to create their own virtual worlds. Immersive, customizable worlds are engaging and serving as creative outlets for large audiences that fashion brands are looking to target.

As the worlds of fashion, fabric and technology intersect, new collaborations are driving innovation.

Innovation in Fabric

MIT and the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT), joined forces in 2017 to build a bridge between design and engineering, and develop sustainable fabrics. 

MIT and FIT also reached out to AFFOA (Advanced Functional Fabrics of America), a Cambridge, Massachusetts–based nonprofit public-private partnership. AFFOA and its membership ecosystem are helping to develop transformative textile-based products that meet the needs of defense, commercial and consumer markets. 

The MIT, FIT AFFOA collaboration is yielding interesting results, as fashion and tech come together. Here is the latest news according to releases from the following groups.

Team Natural Futurism, developed a biodegradable lifestyle shoe using natural material alternatives, including bacterial cellulose and mycelium, and advanced fiber concepts to avoid use of chemical dyes.

Team Peacock, prototyped athletic apparel with color-changing material to highlight an athlete’s movement and quickly analyze motion through an app.

Team Ecollab, designed apparel and footwear using PE (polyethylene) and color changing material that is multifaceted and environmentally conscious.

Team Laboratory 56, created footwear to enhance longevity of product and reduce waste using PE, while connecting with the community through a recycling app program.

Tech fashion and the metaverse merge at CES 2022. 

What strategies can advance the vitality of the post-COVID smart city?

The pandemic has clarified smart cities require a toolbox that leverages technologies for scalable implementations. Included are connectivity/5G, the cloud, IoT, machine learning, artificial intelligence (AI) and blockchain. They enable a city to become hyperconnected for greater efficiencies and sustainability based on technology, data integration and analytics, cybersecurity and citizen engagement.

Climate Change and Energy

Cities represent 2% of the earth’s surface but are responsible for 60%+ of CO2 emissions. The global population is expected to increase by 2.5 billion people in the next 25 years.

The pandemic put a green spotlight on the need for cleaner air, less pollution, lower-carbon and more efficient electricity available anytime, anywhere giving more control to businesses and consumers. The industry is moving from a traditional one-way generation, transmission, distribution and retail paradigm towards a model that is similar to the way we produce, view and interact with content through various devices. It’s about multifaceted ubiquitous access where people are independent producers and consumers of energy.

While energy represents one of the last economic sectors to undergo digital disruption, smart utilities are generating the highest share of startup revenues in the smart city market, according to Statista. This includes companies in the electric, gas, water, waste and safety sectors that employ connected sensors across their grids to analyze operations and deliver services more efficiently.

Adjacencies are arising such as improved energy storage and energy management of smart buildings ranging from commercial real estate and facilities management to the smart connected home.

Urban retrofitting is emerging as an alternative solution to starting from scratch.

Governance and Standards: Urban Digitization

Digitization is transforming the public sector and how electronics systems support local governments, citizens, communities and businesses. The pandemic underscored the need for data driven management, with inputs coming from many sectors including acquiring, recording and analyzing massive quantities of citizen data from a complex network of interconnected sensors, devices and software including contactless financial transactions.

Technology standards are the glue that maximizes efficiencies across the smart city landscape. Security and consistent interoperability need to be assured since integrators and developers navigate diverse ecosystems and a plethora of complex and fragmented standards between various devices that adhere to different protocols.

Increasingly needed are privacy friendly regulatory guidelines, transparency, and other guidance around the rules that govern algorithms to protect citizens privacy. Further, with ransomware attacks increasing, the focus on cybersecurity innovations is intensifying.

Since data, computing and connectivity are central to effectively managing cities, mitigating uncertainties and predicting growth or declining sectors, the search is on for the right configuration of policy to govern AI, without kneecapping innovation.

Today, city operations are interdependent and no longer function in silos. Urban planners also do not have the luxury of delaying technology modernization until the tech ‘matures.’ The pandemic illustrated how technical mismanagement cost lives as the vaccine process laid bare the inadequacies of U.S. public service infrastructures.

Cities that embrace new thinking and innovations will overcome these challenges and thrive. Urban retrofitting is emerging as an alternative solution to starting from scratch. Increasingly, the pathway towards smart cities will include various bridges into the future.

What innovative solutions can advance the societal and economic vitality of the post-COVID smarter city? New infrastructures need to be built and transformative solutions will make cities smarter and more responsive to the needs of its citizens even during a crisis

Smart city initiatives promise to make cities more connected, efficient and sustainable. 

COVID-19 tested the resilience of cities. Over half of the world’s population today lives in urban centers, and that is expected to jump to 68% by 2050, per the UN. Smart cities include technologies for scalable implementations such as 5G, artificial intelligence (AI) and blockchain. Working together these technologies can hyper-connect a city for greater efficiencies and sustainability based on data integration and analytics, cybersecurity and citizen engagement.

Post-pandemic, these parameters encompass collecting and contextualizing ICT (Information and Communications Technologies) as well as connecting physical devices using IoT (internet of things)networks and geographical information systems (GIS) — for greater endurance and more equitable communities.

COVID-19 was a wake-up call around the globe. The pandemic accentuated how ill-equipped cities were. Many municipalities barely functioned, lacked agile and efficient management and had inadequate infrastructures, datapoints and funding to deal with the situation. The resulting upheaval underscored that communities need to be better prepared for shorter-term catastrophes and other extreme events.

Three Trends for Reimagining Urbanization

Opportunities related to smart city startups worldwide will reach $39 billion in 2021, according to Statista. AksjeBloggen.com is projecting that smart city startups worldwide will generate $110.7 billion in revenue by 2025, a trifold increase in five years. Many lessons were learned from the pandemic, here are a few:

1. Rethinking Neighborhoods

With restricted mobility, people stayed within their neighborhoods. This is reigniting interest in the “15-minute city” by urban managers. It’s based on livable and self-sufficient neighborhoods within a city that are pedestrian-friendly. Some cities are developing more car-free thoroughfares. The reduced need to commute to the office and the rise of remote working and online shopping, for instance, will reduce the demand for space in city centers. How will this space be repurposed?

2. Public Space: Redefined 

The trend towards greener cities took on new meaning, with a resurging interest in the outdoors. Urban planners are thinking differently about street space and considering the playbook of their European counterparts, focused on squares, gardens, and pedestrian-focused street designs. While some U.S. cities created bike lanes other cities like New York experimented with pedestrian promenades or slow streets. As a consequence of the pandemic limiting indoor restaurant capacity, cities expanded sidewalks to house parklets or ‘terrace zones’ for outdoor dining reminiscent of Paris bistros.

3. Mobility 

There also was an uptake in ‘active transportation’ with walking, biking, e-scooters and other micro-mobility options. Less driving resulted in reduced carbon emissions and improved air quality, accelerating discussions about sustainability, lower emissions and pollutants. Ford recently announced plans to invest $30 billion in vehicle electrification efforts by 2025, and the company anticipates that 40% of its global sales by 2030 will be fully electric vehicles. Overall, there is a global movement towards increasing the safety and easy flow of transportation — whether for e-mobility, autonomous transport, communications and intelligent transport systems. While reducing car use was trending pre-pandemic – an emerging question is, will shared mobility survive the pandemic?

Urban Retrofitting 

Instead of starting from scratch to build new cities — urban retrofitting is emerging as an alternative solution but the path towards smart cities will be manifold. The pandemic underscored the need for public-private partnerships between government and communities with business, academia, the tech industry and fast-moving startups. Smart cities require integrated frameworks, systems and solutions that enable efficient customizable responsiveness to localized context, cultures and communities. Plus, private sector investments are often required by cash-strapped cities. 

New infrastructures need to be built with innovative solutions to make cities smarter and responsive to the needs of its citizens in ordinary times and under crisis.

Who can forget the fanfare when AR and VR first launched focused on futuristic entertainment experiences — Google Glass, the cardboard VR viewer or the first Oculus Rift, HoloLens? The AR/VR market is now forecast to grow from $13 billion in 2020 to over $67 billion by 2024, according to Digi-Capital.

The evolution of these technologies highlights their diverse use cases. AR delivers a modified view of the real physical world while VR delivers a unique experience in a virtual world. AR provides computer-generated context and information about the world letting users interact with ‘real’ surroundings. While VR allows users to interact with immersive worlds enabling people to learn new skills through simulation. For now, VR’s entertainment focus makes it a subset of the consumer games market, with VR apps on Steam, FaceBook/Oculus and Sony app stores. 

Mobile AR 

During the pandemic, mobile AR showed what is possible for AR-enabled messaging platforms with Facebook Messenger, Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat as examples. While each has a different approach to user engagement, usage frequency for AR lenses and filters is high, with Snap claiming more than 170 million users daily, based on its June 2020 Developer Conference. Smart glasses with integrated displays may be coming soon — fully computer capable yet lightweight, stylish and wireless. Other form factors in the works include smart contact lenses.

Digi-Capital forecasts that messaging-based mobile AR’s active installed base will top 1.5 billion by 2024, OS-based mobile AR over one billion by 2024, followed by web-based mobile AR. All mobile AR platforms combined could top 2.7 billion in five years. Many companies are involved in this space including:

• Nintendo-Niantic agreed to jointly develop apps featuring AR aimed at providing real-world activities for players. The companies are introducing an app based on the puzzle video game franchise Pikmin. Launching this year, it includes activities to “make walking more delightful.”
• Apple reportedly has an AR/VR research team working on projects that could be implemented into future iOS devices including a headset or AR smart glasses to be released in 2022. Apple has a stable of AR and VR patents, and expertise gained through acquisitions including Akonia Holographics, Emmotient, Faceshift, Flyby Media, Metaio, NextVR, PrimeSense, RealFace, Spaces and Vrvana. 
• FaceBook Reality Labs is developing a wrist-based wearable interface for AR glasses using software that can read nerve impulses. Developed by CTRL-Labs, acquired by Facebook in 2019, the work is part of research into human computer interaction technologies. This could lead to AR glasses as an always-accessible, reliable neural interface with subtle hand motion controls that may potentially replace keyboards or TV remotes. 
• Google’s Earth VR puts the world at your fingertips. Its Tilt Brush enables you to paint in 3D space with VR and is compatible with Oculus and HTC Vive. 

Reimaging Digital Shopping

In May 2020, Kohl’s collaborated with Snapchat to create Kohl’s AR Virtual Closet. Using a smartphone and the Snapchat app, consumers enter an AR dressing room, mix and match items, and make a purchase from home using the app.

Retailers like IKEA and Wayfair have AR apps that display how furniture would look in your home. Louis Vuitton and Gucci offer apps that let consumers ‘try-before-you-buy’ from home. And when COVID-19 temporarily closed Kendra Scott jewelry brand stores, the retailer introduced an AR tool letting customers virtually try-on jewelry at home and then purchase. Beauty retailers Sephora and Ulta are using AR to help customers digitally test beauty products since customers can’t physically test instore currently. 

These are just a few applications but health care also holds enormous promise. Opportunities in this new ecosystem including new developers, suppliers and channels will grow as AR/VR uses continue to evolve.