Vizoo is a market innovator for material scanning and digitization solutions for fashion, furniture and automotive purposes. The hard- and software products made in Germany are an integral part of 3D clothing and product visualization processes. The easy an efficient handling even allows 3D inexperienced users to digitize materials in a high-quality manner. As technology partner of the 3D ready initiative of PERFORMANCE DAYS, Vizoo already proofs how digital fabrics enhance the fabric selling process. And that today, digital materials are just a logical extension to a physical functional fabric fair. Following the increasing demand for digital sourcing solutions, PERFORMANCE DAYS select the best fabrics, scan them, test them for their material qualities and create 3D files and provide to you the U3MA and SBSAR files (compatible with most 3D software) - ready to download and import into 3D programs.

Renate Eder, Chief Commercial Officer at Vizoo
Renate knows why digitization has to be seen as collaborative effort so that it results in speed and quality gains. In the following interview with PERFORMANCE DAYS, she looks to the future of digitalization and outlines how brands and suppliers benefit from a digital materials workflow and how it can be implemented.

How does Vizoo's 3D scanning technology support the development of textures and materials in the fashion and textile industry?

Digital Product Creation, or 3D Fashion, is becoming widely spread in the Fashion industry and will soon be the standard. Having a digital twin of your garment reduces sample cost, time to market, and makes communication with the manufacturers more precise and faster.
Like in-person meetings vs. virtual meetings, digital garments are starting to reduce the need for physical samples.

Vizoo provides technology to digitize fabrics for these digital garments, in a fast and easy way, and with the highest quality. These digital fabric twins are the foundation and a crucial success factor for digital product creation, just as important as the physical fabric is for the physical garment.

What advantages do these 3D scans offer over traditional methods?

Traditional methods of digitizing materials are very manual, unprecise, take a lot of time and require 3D expertise. This is how digital fabric twins were created 10 years ago, often involving a camera setup or flatbed scanner.

With sophisticated scanning equipment like the Vizoo xTex scanner, the process has completely changed. Most of the manual labor is now done automatically, e.g. analyzing the fabric color, reflection, structure and transparency as well as predicting the draping behavior.

Now, digital twins are created faster, more realistic, and need less expertise – making the fabric digitization scalable in the industry, instead of an expert tool.

In addition, high-quality 3D assets really help bring out the best in digital garments, especially when convincing other colleagues. It is like comparing a bad video game graphic from the 90ies versus a photorealistic image.

What developments and innovations does the future hold for 3D scanning technology?

The landscape of fabric digitization has evolved significantly over the last 10 years. And for sure the technology itself will continue to improve, leveraging emerging technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI) to enhance the capabilities of digital twin creation.

However, of greater importance and urgency than technology updates is the transition of the industry to a true digital and data-driven supply chain.

It is important to consider that 3D and all kinds of data are the the foundation of many future applications, including the metaverse, AI, e-commerce, and digital product development. If your company aims to be involved in this field – digitization is the foundation of this development.

What are the opportunities and where are the biggest challenges?

There are numerous textile companies proving the successful implementation of 3D technology. It is not only global brands like adidas saving hundred thousand of samples for over 10 years now, also fabric and trim suppliers are demonstrating the efficiency of 3D. For example, JML Apparel is offering a fully digital catalog where their clients can browse new materials 24/7.

Unfortunately, the digital process adoption is still going slow. Many brands complain that vendors are adopting technology too slowly and that fabric mills say the return on investment (ROI) is not meeting their expectations. A very dominant problem is the lack of brand commitment to request fewer physical samples. Thus, most of the time 3D stays a free of charge additional service, while the traditional processes remains untouched.

Consequently, the majority of the industry players are not there yet. In order to reach a critical mass of digital fabric data, I do enivsion a joint approach by brands, manufacturers and mills facing those top 3 challenges:

1. Brands must accept digital fabrics as a way to communicate and select fabric data.
2. The value of a digital fabric is similar to their physical equivalent. It has a cost and cannot be for free.
3. A Digital Twin has to exist for each and every physical fabric developed. Digitization becomes just a natural part of the fabric mills inline process.

For the second time, PERFORMANCE DAYS is offering a dedicated area for digitalization in the Tech Hub area - which key trends do innovation managers need to respond to in order to play a pioneering ro

I do think that the Tech Hub area is extremely helpful for visitors and exhibitors open to experience new technologies. I am sure that we will see more data management and AI tools as well as more interactive and immersive applications this time. At the Vizoo booth, we'll be introducing new showroom applications that merge the digital and physical worlds. However, I would strongly recommend to the textile companies' decision makers not to get hung up on a specific technology but for a solution to your problem.

A core technology showing the digital transformation of the industry is the performance days theLoop platform. In there, all physical fabric swatches in the performance days forum and some of the exhibitor's booths are linked to their digital twin. Designers can access the 3D version of the fabrics and visualize them right away in their Design software. In theLoop fabric selection happens completely digitally and without wasting time.

This also caters to the future, young Designer being a digital native, celebrating remote work. We must consider that this generation might not be willing to wait for the sales person to ring the bell and bring their heavy catalogue – once a season. Traditional industry has to reach this new generation with different toolsets – providing a more constant stream of updates, and timely communication.