Walmart introduced a virtual fitting room app to try on clothes at home

• “Be Your Own Model” is Walmart’s next step in personalizing the online clothing shopping experience.
• The retail giant acquired virtual testing platform Zeekit in 2021.
• Shoppers can upload their own photos if they want to try on the 270,000-plus items available.

Walmart is offering consumers a more intimate online shopping experience with a virtual try-on device that lets users see how clothes look on their bodies.

The new feature — which launched on Thursday in the Walmart app for iOS users — comes after the retail giant acquired virtual fitting room startup Zekit in 2021. In March, Walmart launched its “Pick My Model” technology, which allows customers to choose from among 50 models. Models of different sizes to see how clothes fit on a body similar to them.

Now, in the next chapter of “Be Your Own Model,” users can try on more than 270,000 items on their bodies — but they’ll need to take off their underwear or tights first for the feature to work. Exactly.

“This experience allows customers to use their own photos to better visualize how their clothes will look and creates a shopping experience that we think will be very compelling to the customer,” said Denise Incandella, Walmart’s executive vice president of apparel and private brands, in a statement.

More moderate users still have options. With the Walmart app, users can choose to view clothes on a model of their choice or decide to be the model themselves, according to the company’s explainer video.

Unlike previous technology, like placing a photo on top of another for virtual experiments, Walmart uses algorithms and machine learning to simulate a more realistic situation.

“Walmart is the first to offer apparel brands a virtual try-on experience, and it’s the most realistic application I’ve seen,” Incandella said.

Walmart is the latest retailer to jump on the virtual testing trend. In August, Amazon launched an augmented reality service that lets customers try on shoes, and other retailers like Macy’s and Adidas have also previously worked with Zekit to experiment with virtual reality.