Just in time for prom season, Google is officially rolling out Vision Match as part of the Google search experience on mobile. The feature was previously available as an experiment. Starting today, you can use it to describe a look you’re going for and have Google help you shop for it.
Vision Match is pretty self-explanatory: type in your “vision” of what you want to wear—maybe it was a dress you saw on someone recently, or you’re simply thinking up an outfit in your head—and Google will use the query to spawn images that look like what you’re describing. You can then use those images to hone in on a search across the web. Vision Match taps into Google’s Shopping Graph, a bona fide data set just for finding looks and ‘fits among whatever the search engine giant has indexed. It’ll bring you to real-life pieces of clothing you can buy.
A version of this works with cosmetics, too, and that’s also rolling out this week. In Google search, you can describe makeup looks with phrases like “soft glam” or “gothy prom queen”—think what you’d type into YouTube to bring up a tutorial. Or, if you have a specific celebrity in mind whose recent look you hope to emulate, you can type in their name and the event they were photographed at plus “makeup” to get the search started. From there, Google will serve up looks you can try using the camera on your mobile device. Below it, search will populate with links to where to buy some of the products associated with the look you want to pull off.
Google also has partnerships with major clothing brands and retailers for a feature called Virtual Try-on, which also received an update. It uses Google’s image diffusion technology to simulate how clothing would crease, drape, and form on real-life models of varying body types. It’s finally been updated so you can see what pants look like with the rest of the outfit. You can try on pieces from brands like American Eagle, Everlane, and H&M before they arrive at your door.
Shopping on the internet is no longer fun. It makes sense that Google would lean into this to sell us on the utility of its artificial intelligence. I like the idea in practice; Google’s demonstration of Vision Match showed it to be easy to use and relatively straightforward. But we’re already concerned with how crowded the Google search results page is. This feature will debut on the mobile search app and live under the Shopping tab.
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