Project Management

Photo Booth – The next Retail Marketing Tool

  • Vidya
  • May 21, 2021
Photo Booth – The next Retail Marketing Tool

Photo Booth- Photo clicking & social sharing trend is a rage amongst the people of today’s social media generation.This has brought forth several visual-centric platforms. While we have seen a lot of brands put into action creative visual-centric activities during events or while running campaigns, some innovative ones are planning to initiate activities such as photo booths, magic mirror etc in their stores to provide a better in-store customer experience.

Yes, you read it right! One may have never considered the concept of an in-store photo booth until they discovered how much exciting it can really be for their customers and how it could make an impact on business. A photo booth ensures your customer’s involvement and increases your brand’s visibility thus acting as a great social media marketing tool.

  • Dave.AI, a sales augmentation platform, provides brands the ability to convert marketing interactions into sales opportunities. Dave.AI helps brands personalize these interactions to provide an excellent customer product discovery experience thereby improving sales.
  • Dave.AI, has partnered with one of the world’s leading fashion brand, United Colors of Benetton to augment In-Store Customer Experience. This partnership intends to improve the brand’s engagement with kids and digital natives as they discover products in Benetton’s flagship stores. Dave.AI, also provides actionable insights to marketing & merchandising teams to make data driven decisions.
Photo Booth
Photo Booth

Dave.AI’s AR powered photo booth at Benetton is aimed to help customers discover apparel products in a setting that suits their persona allowing customers to change the background of the pictures taken in a regular store with a green/blue screen background. The algorithm used to process the images is background subtraction.Here an android application is designed to run background subtraction algorithm which is used to capture an image of the customer. The application learns the background before an image of the customer is clicked. The background is chosen from the available list of background images on the application by the customer. The application subtracts the learnt pixels from the frame and substitutes transparent pixels or alpha, then the image of the customer is overlapped over the chosen background image. This process happens for every frame at the rate of 24fps.The frame with the customer image with alpha overlapped with the chosen background is saved as single image when the capture is triggered. The final image is then shared with the customer. 
For example, when a customer who is buying a leather jacket stands in the photo booth, he/she can capture a picture with a bike on a highway as the background wearing the same jacket. This way the photo booth helps customers experience a whole new world. The same experience could be delivered on a kiosk without the use of a green screen, to create interactive experiences using Digital out of Home.

Sreenath , Digital Experience Engineer- Dave.AI, talks about the implementation of this algorithm and says
“Initially the device captures more than 250 frames of the original background, learns the background as well as the changes in background due to external factors with a preferred learning rate. After this learning is over, the background disappears or is reduced. When a person or any object appears in the frame, the object cannot be reduced as it cannot learn the current frame with the object and hence the pixels containing the object appears in the frame and the rest of the pixels containing the trained background remains to be reduced & hence appears transparent.” Using a Green/Blue Screen helps in improving the accuracy of Background subtraction. Even with a Green Screen, this is a comparatively difficult problem to solve, because of changes in lighting and interaction between the subject and the background.This is one of the ways in which Dave helps brands engage better with the customers, improve profitable sales, boost customer loyalty and provide meaningful insights to the brands. With the trend of retail stores becoming media spaces & experience centers, there is significant demand in the adoption of technology. We can expect most retail spaces to adapt such innovative, visual-centric technologies in the coming days!

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