Motorola recently released a very detailed and informative study covering technology and it’s impact on online and offline retail.  The 2014 Motorola Solutions Shopping Study covers topics including:

• Retail technology that shoppers felt would influence their shopping experience (broken down by Generation)
• Online, mobile and in-store technologies and relevant uses of these technologies in each channel
• Retail associate views on different technology they are looking forward to implementing and what they feel would impact a customer’s shopping experience

Of the findings, I thought 2 slides were very telling as to the impact Virtual Dressing Rooms will have both online and for the in-store environment.  The slide below from the Motorola Shopping Study shows a generational breakdown of shoppers and the different technologies that they thought would influence their shopping experience in an in-store retail environment.

As you can see from the highlighted area above, as the demographic skews younger (i.e. Gen Y), there’s a greater desire from younger shoppers to utilize technologies that help provide an on-demand and personalized experience for retail.  Virtual Dressing Room technology can provide both on-demand inventory information as well as a virtual view of how the item looks on the shopper.  The combined percentage of 47% (for Intelligent Dressing Rooms and Interactive Mirrors) represents the second largest survey result.

Since 2007, retailers in the U.S. have seen a decline in teenager visits to the mall. There’s definitely opportunity here for retailers to utilize these technologies to improve the shopping experience for this younger generation and bring them back into stores.

Shoppers are not the only ones who view Virtual Dressing Room functionality as a benefit to the in-store retail environment.  The slide below also outlines retail associates’ views on technology that they believe will affect the customer’s shopping experience.

Again, taking into account that certain Virtual Dressing Room technology provides functionality for a more intelligent dressing room and provides an interactive mirror effect, this would place Virtual Dressing Technology near the top of the list as another innovation for retail that can impact and influence a shopping experience – especially for the younger shopper.

When we developed our Virtual Style Sense Virtual Dressing Room technology for in-store retail, we did so to make the dressing room experience more efficient for shoppers and to provide more data-driven opportunities for retailers.  There will always be a conceptual driven future of retail that shows some amazing potential technology, but there’s also technology readily available today to improve the current in-store retail experience.

You can find the entire Motorola study here (PDF).