The high-street is finally fighting back thanks to the latest breakthrough in three dimensional holographic projection. Lonnie Ryedale, the driving force behind Holomain Projections describes the thinking that lead to her ground-breaking business idea. ‘I had been an on-line shopper since the birth of the industry but was always disappointed by one of its biggest drawbacks, the inability to see things as they really are before you purchase them. By my reckoning I was sending back about forty per cent of the things I was ordering just because they didn’t fit or they weren’t quite like they looked in the photograph and if I was then I guessed that so was everyone else. I thought that there must be a commercial opportunity here if only I could work out a way to tap into it. Ideally what I wanted was the ability to look at something close up and near to my home before committing to the purchase. A shop would have been great but there was no way that it could stock everything I might fancy.’
Ryedale had been working as a volunteer projectionist at a local art-house cinema and had been reading an article about 3D films when the idea suddenly came to her. ‘If I can make what looks like a three dimensional image using two fairly traditional projectors, what could be done with three or more high definition projectors?’ she adds. ‘I got talking to some of my like-minded colleagues at the cinema and soon we had worked out how to create a rudimentary holographic image using static images from photographic slides. From there the idea just snowballed.’
The next step was to work with the nearby university who developed some software capable of projecting a single image from different angles onto the same spot. A light mist is used as the projection medium and with this the item magically appears in front of the viewer which is visible from all angles.
‘It is as if the item is there in front of you,’ continues Lonnie excitedly. ‘We opened our first shop in Greek Street in Leeds. The customers would come in and look at the products they were interested in buying at our internet café. Using the software we would scrape the flat image and dimensions from the web site and use these to create the lifelike image. If acceptable the customer would then order the goods and could pick them up the next day. It worked like a dream. Return rates were about ten per cent and we used this difference to gain a discount from the internet businesses. We are now working with these suppliers to provide much better images, similar to those used in 3D printing as we have found the higher quality the image then the lower the returns rate.’
‘Using similar technology we have now moved from household items into clothing. Using laser scanners we are able to measure the customer accurately and project the desired clothing onto a series of ‘mirrors’ that they stand in front of. The effect is incredible. You know that you are not wearing the clothes but you can see yourself as if you are. The brain compensates quickly for the slight imperfections and we are working hard to iron these glitches out. An added unforeseen benefit has been that, given the correct supplier we can tailor the clothes specifically to the client, giving that perfect fit, at a premium of course.’
So what of the future for Holomain Projections? Here is Ryedale again. ‘So far we have opened ten shops in the north of England, all on the high-street. What has been interesting is that the better shops have been in the smaller market towns where the choice of shops has not been great. Our approach is allowing the high-street to fight back against the rise and rise of online trading and we are planning to open as many shops as quickly as our capital allows.’
Thoughts from a Guerrilla Worker 