Richard Beard, Historian, Joins Fashion Research as Gettysburg Fellow

Posted on March 26, 2011 by | 2 Comments

New York, NY March 26, 2011 – Richard Beard, Historian, Joins Fashion Research Institute as Gettysburg Fellow

Fashion Research Institute CEO, Shenlei Winkler, announces that historian Dr. Richard Beard has joined the FRI team as Gettysburg Fellow with the Fashion Research Foundation, a nonprofit affiliate of FRI. Dr. Beard is a historian and administrator who has held senior leadership positions in several of the nation’s most noteworthy history museums, including the Museum of the City of New York, the Atlanta History Center, the New-York Historical Society, and the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum.

His career, characterized by a commitment to vibrant exhibitions and public programming, has included the development of major exhibitions on the American Civil War and Abraham Lincoln.  Dr. Beard publishes regularly on historical topics as well as matters related to the museum profession.  Recent publications include “The Legacy of the Civil War,” a co-authored essay for the National Park Service’s official Sesquicentennial handbook The Civil War Remembered and “From Civil War to Civil Rights: The Opportunities of the Civil War Sesquicentennial,” a forthcoming article to appear in History News.

Dr. Beard is currently part of the project team developing a national exhibition on freedom and slavery, the volunteer coordinator for the Civil War Sesquicentennial for the American Association for State and Local History.

“I am very excited to be involved in the initial stages of developing what promises to be an incredible on-line resource for any and everyone interested in the Civil War.  As more and more Americans turn to the Web for their history, the development of Virtual Gettysburg could not come at a better moment.  The upcoming commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the Civil War promises to engage millions of Americans with the three-day battle in the small Pennsylvania town of Gettyburg, an event that did much to determine the war’s outcome.” says Beard.

”We are excited about having Dr. Beard join the Fashion Research Team.” says Shenlei Winkler, CEO of the Fashion Research Institute. “We think his wealth of knowledge about the American Civil War and expertise in producing substantive public programming will provide tremendous insights into the Gettysburg Redux project, and his input and guidance will help ensure that the project is developed with  historical accuracy.”

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Fashion Research Institute has been leading the effort to push the use of virtual immersive environments (virtual worlds) for the purpose of training, development and education.  Gettysburg Redux is a visionary project intended to accurately reproduce the 3-day Battle of Gettysburg in a virtual world for multidisciplinary uses.

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About Fashion Research Institute, Inc.: The Fashion Research Institute is at the forefront of developing innovative design & merchandising solutions for the apparel industry.  They research and develop products and systems for the fashion industry that sweepingly address wasteful business and production practices. Shenlei Winkler’s work spans both couture and mass-market design and development for the real life apparel industry. A successful designer, her lifetime sales of her real life apparel designs have now reached more than $70 million USD, with more than 25 million-dollar styles in her portfolio. Her couture work has appeared extensively on stage and movie screen.

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Posted in education, Fashion Research Institute, OpenSim, ScienceSim, Virtual World

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White Paper Available: Leveraging the Power of Virtual Worlds for Collaboration

Posted on March 25, 2011 by | 1 Comment

New York, NY March 24, 2011 – Fashion Research Institute Publishes Latest Thought Piece: Leveraging the Power of Virtual Worlds for Collaboration by CEO Shenlei Winkler.

Fashion Research Institute CEO, Shenlei Winkler, announces that FRI’s latest publication, Leveraging the Power of Virtual Worlds for Collaboration, has been published.

Based on a presentation initially made in January 2008 to IBM Research North America, this whitepaper incorporates case studies drawn from FRI’s well-publicized collaborations in business, education and fashion, and focuses on some additional use cases.

Leveraging the Power of Virtual Worlds for Collaboration may be downloaded from the Fashion Research Institute web site.

About Fashion Research Institute, Inc.: The Fashion Research Institute is at the forefront of developing innovative design & merchandising solutions for the apparel industry.  They research and develop products and systems for the fashion industry that sweepingly address wasteful business and production practices. Shenlei Winkler’s work spans both couture and mass-market design and development for the real life apparel industry. A successful designer, her lifetime sales of her real life apparel designs have now reached more than $70 million USD, with more than 25 million-dollar styles in her portfolio. Her couture work has appeared extensively on stage and movie screen.

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Posted in 3D, Avatar, design, education, fashion, Fashion Research Institute, IBM, Intel, OpenSim, Shenlei, Virtual World

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Jason D. Arnold, Attorney at Law, Joins Fashion Research Institute’s Black Dress Technology as In-House Counsel

Posted on March 21, 2011 by | Comments Off

New York, NY March 21, 2011 – Jason D. Arnold, Attorney at Law, Joins Fashion Research Institute’s Black Dress Technology as In-House Counsel

Fashion Research Institute CEO, Shenlei Winkler, announces that Attorney Jason Arnold has joined the FRI team as in-house counsel for Black Dress Technology, a wholly-owned subsidiary of FRI. Mr. Arnold is a 2007 James E. Beasley Temple University School of Law Graduate. Admitted to practice in Pennsylvania and to the U.S. District Court of the Middle District of Pennsylvania, he was an active member in the American Bar Association serving on committees in the Intellectual Property and the Science and Technology divisions.  He is also a member of the Pennsylvania Bar Association.

Furthermore, he has worked on copyright infringement litigation, including assisting in writing a certiori petition for the United States Supreme Court.  He has worked on trademark registration and infringement cases.

“I am very pleased to be joining Black Dress Technology because of their visionary use of immersive technology, something I personally believe will be integral to our professional and personal lives,” says Arnold.

“We are excited about having Mr. Arnold join the Black Dress Technology Team.” Says Shenlei Winkler, CEO of the Fashion Research Institute. “We think his experience in virtual worlds and particularly his emphasis in virtual goods and content will make him an integral part of the Fashion Research Institute team, focusing particularly on areas of content licensing from design houses in the apparel industry to virtual goods development for game development.”

Fashion Research Institute has been leading the effort to defining legal templates for users of decentralized OpenSim-based virtual worlds, including End User Licensing Agreements and easy-to-use content licensing templates.  Mr. Arnold served with distinction on the OpenSim Legal Steering Committee formed by FRI in 2009.

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About Fashion Research Institute, Inc.: The Fashion Research Institute is at the forefront of developing innovative design & merchandising solutions for the apparel industry.  They research and develop products and systems for the fashion industry that sweepingly address wasteful business and production practices. Shenlei Winkler’s work spans both couture and mass-market design and development for the real life apparel industry. A successful designer, her lifetime sales of her real life apparel designs have now reached more than $70 million USD, with more than 25 million-dollar styles in her portfolio. Her couture work has appeared extensively on stage and movie screen.

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Posted in 3D, apparel industry, Black Dress Technology, Fashion Research Institute, OpenSim

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Thinking about Community, Standards, and Policy

Posted on March 10, 2011 by | 1 Comment

Last week, John Galliano was dismissed from Christian Dior as their creative director.  Galliano had held this position for 15 years and there was no reason to expect he wouldn’t hold it for years to come.  His presence in the fashion community has been strong and decisive and his money-making collections loved by many.

So what changed that in a space of a week he went from respected designer to unemployed scoff-law?

Certainly not his talent – he’s still a talented, creative designer.  But somehow along the way he started believing his own press and in a startling display of drunken hubris he verbally abused and maligned people near him in a Paris bar, expressing bigoted sentiments and other hate speech.

Not surprisingly, in our increasingly interconnected world, some bright young thing was there, captured his moment on her cell phone, and uploaded it to YouTube, ensuring that Galliano’s fifteen minutes of shame would be widely shared with a global audience.  Galliano’s actions netted him a pink slip from Dior and civil litigation in the French courts.  Backlash from within his community was swift and uneasy, as people figuratively drew their skirts away from a man who, as a result of his personal expression of incredible bigotry, is at least momentarily a pariah of sorts in the global community.

Galliano’s outburst follows hard on the heels of another famous actor, Charlie Sheen, who also apparently believed his own press and vilified his employers in a public forum.  Not surprisingly, he too was severed from his employers, although how his community will react to this is less clear than Galliano’s ritual sacrifice.

We’re interested in these stories because both instances are applicable to a current area of exploration for us in ScienceSim.  We are researching and thinking about this idea of community, community standards, and how the community enforces its standards on its members.  We are working on this very question in the Senate in ScienceSim right now, and it is not an easy question to resolve.

How do you define community; who is a member and who is merely a visitor; how do you define your community decency standards, and how do you express them to a global audience? We had, for example, no idea that verbally vilifying a person in France could result in a civil lawsuit; here in the US that same level of verbal expression might be protected under our First Amendment that guarantees free speech, regardless of how hateful the person it was directed at might find it.  Nor does this French law necessarily prevent a person from being verbally abusive and hateful to another, e.g., Galliano.

We are still working at defining what the ScienceSim community is. There are lessons learned from both Mr. Galliano’s and Mr. Sheen’s misbehavior that will certainly color what we define as expected and appropriate behavior from our community members.

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Posted in 3D, apparel industry, Fashion Research Institute, OpenSim, ScienceSim

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The Multiplier Effect: Pricing, Commodities, & the Supply Chain

Posted on February 24, 2011 by | Comments Off

This is the sort of thing that seems like common sense to us:

“GLOBAL[sic], WHY ARE THE YARN PRICES RISING? IT IS BECOMING EXTREMELY DIFFICULT TO MATCH TARGET PRICES. GOING FORWARD, I THINK SOME OF THIS INCREASE WILL HAVE TO BE PASSED TO THE CONSUMER.”

After a couple of years of difficult weather resulting in massive decreases in the cotton crop harvest; a decrease in the number of hectares of cropped cotton; an increase in the cost of a barrel of oil (one of, if not the, major multipliers in the garment production supply chain); civil unrest causing disruption in the labor pool…why yes, prices are in fact going to rise.

This is just common sense.  Manufacturers commonly handle increases in supply chain costs by cutting corners in production rather than passing those costs directly to the consumer. However, at a certain point, manufacturers can no longer cut corners without the product they are making (whatever it may be, glass bottles, t-shirts, ink pens, etc.) becoming so shoddy that either it can’t be shipped without too much loss in shipping or the customer will no longer accept it and will stop buying it in the stores.

We’ve seen this in both local and big box stores, where the quality of the textiles they are using for garments has decreased.

Let’s take the apocryphal t-shirt, worn the world over, loved and hated by many, owned by most, a basic commodity garment if ever there was one.   We have t-shirts we purchased five years ago from a big box retailer for the exact same cost as t-shirts from the same retailer in store this year, but the ones manufactured five years ago are much higher quality.  The yarn is heavier, and hence the t-shirt itself is heavier, better quality, and will last longer.   This year’s version uses a yarn with a much thinner denier, lower percentage of cotton, and physically weighs less than the older t-shirt. The newer model is also cut ‘skinnier’ or more form-fitting, which may  have been a design option, but we’re willing to bet it may also have been a price point decision that was passed along to Design.  A lot of textile was cut out in moving from a  standard boxy t-shirt to the more form-fitting one.

What will be cut out of next year’s t-shirt to the hit the price point, or will this retailer increase its prices?  The retailer in question is known for price pointing, so we wonder if it will squeeze its manufacturers, or if there will be a price increase.

It is a very interesting question, will manufacturers ‘have’ to pass along some of the increased costs of manufacturing?  Some retailers have already started: the cost of basic cotton shirts have increased US$1-2 per shirt so it is a matter of time before others follow.  We hope that as this happens, two things occur: that retailers and manufacturers don’t attempt to skimp on the supply chain to produce inferior goods and that consumers will demand a better quality product that will last.

In the developed world, we are too accustomed to cheap goods. Perhaps it is time we changed our focus to higher quality goods that will last, and for which we pay a higher up-front cost.

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Posted in apparel industry, design, Fashion Research Institute

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Fashion Research Institute Oversees Another Round of the Science Sim Land Grant Program with Intel Labs

Posted on February 18, 2011 by | 1 Comment

New York, NY February 18, 2011 – Fashion Research Institute Oversees Another Round of the Science Sim Land Grant Program with Intel Labs

Fashion Research Institute has been collaborating with Intel Labs since 2009, helping to push the limits of content development, and overseeing the Science Sim Land Grant Program. The program consists of ‘supersized’ 3D volumes called regions, which can support 100,000 primitive units. These regions are awarded for a six-month period to educators, scientists, and researchers who wish to explore using OpenSim for their work, but who have not yet managed to have a presence in OpenSim.  These regions are provided for six months, with the current program scheduled to end June 30, 2011.

We are pleased to share the 2011 awardees, in alphabetical order.

The Abyss Observatory (http://chikyu-to-umi.com/abyss/) The Abyss Observatory is a museum of earth science, undersea technology and also Sense of Wonder for the mysteries of Earth & Life in 3D virtual world, established mainly by Japan and US volunteers, supported by SciLands, NOAA, JAMSTEC, Open University UK and Science Circle.

“Earth system science research fields are spread world-wide and far from human habitation.  To gain a better understanding of global issues, visualization in immersive virtual world is powerful tool.  Our students can develop observation methods of virtual environment phenomena or law of physics easily, cost-effectively and safely, ”says Hajime Nishimura (RL, JAMSTEC, http://www.jamstec.go.jp/).

IDIA Lab: Institute for Digital Intermedia Arts at Ball State University The Institute For Digital Intermedia Arts is an interdisciplinary design laboratory exploring the intersections between art, science and technology – developing solutions in virtual reality, interactive interface, hybrid worlds, games, simulation and human computer interface. Academic and industry partners engage in intermedial arts projects, collaborating through this project-based learning and research center – investigating the forefront of discourse in emergent media design. http://idialab.org/

John Filwalk of IDIA Lab says, “We are honored to participate in ScienceSim – contributing our design and research approaches to virtual worlds, mash-ups and hybrid reality within the creative and scientific. We will explore broad concerns within human interface with new technology and media. We are developing rich and integrated immersive environments – employing multi-directional interaction with 3D interface to data, information, and media. We are eager to both learn and collaborate with the ScienceSim development community.”

Meta-Institute for Computational Astrophysics (MICA) MICA (http://mica-vw.org/) is the first professional scientific organization based in virtual worlds.  Its goals are to explore how the immersive VR technologies can be best used for science, scholarship, and education, and to promote the development of these technologies and exchange of ideas in the academic community.

“Many of us who took this technology seriously as a potential scientific collaboration and communication platform are convinced that the 3-D interface is the future of the Web – or whatever comes after the Web.  It will change the ways in which we communicate, collaborate, and educate.  We also think that the immersive, collaborative data visualization and exploration will be a powerful new tool for science, and many practical applications beyond the academia,” said George Djogovski, Cal Tech.

Science Circle. The Science Circle is an alliance of Scientists from various disciplines dedicated to connect scientist and students worldwide. We use digital mediums like Second Life® to hold seminars and we are starting in 2011 with various courses for our student group.

“The Science Circle wants to offer our members the possibility to discover OpenSim. Like MICA we are convinced that 3d platforms based on OpenSim are a great tool to offer education. The Science Sim Land GrantPprogram is a great initiative that enables us to do that,” says Agustin Martin on behalf of the Science Circle.

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About Fashion Research Institute, Inc.: FRI is at the forefront of developing innovative design & merchandising solutions for the apparel industry.  They research and develop products and systems for the fashion industry that sweepingly address wasteful business and production practices.

Science Sim is part of an evolution toward online 3D experiences that look, act and feel real. Sometimes dubbed the “3D internet,” Intel Labs refers to this technology trend as immersive connected experiences, or ICE. ScienceSim is differentiated from most virtual world environments by its open source architecture. ScienceSim leverages open source building blocks (installation utilities, management tools, client viewers, etc.) based on OpenSimulator (OpenSim) software.

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Posted in Fashion Research Institute, Intel, OpenSim, ScienceSim

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On Trend: 2011 and beyond

Posted on January 1, 2011 by | Comments Off

Pantone has declared ‘Honeysuckle’ to be the 2011 Color of the Year. Ignoring all of the obvious like is there a beauty pageant where the candidate colors need to perform in the talent competition, the burning question we have is who decided that a hot pink is going to be called ‘Honeysuckle’?  Honeysuckle, where we grew up, is a soft cream to yellow, with occasionally a warm blush in the throat of the flower.  It in no way resembles the screaming hot pink that is being called ‘Honeysuckle’ by Pantone.

Not that we have anything against hot pink (or Honeysuckle) – after all, Mattel’s Barbie doll would have a greatly diminished wardrobe without it – but we find ourselves more interested in hunter green these days.  Rich, luxuriant, the color of growth and the color of money, we see hunter green as being an important color in coming years (although it’s obviously not going to be the trend color for 2011).

We also like foxes. OK, enough with the owls.  The owls had their 3D movie (Guardians) and now we can move on to more interesting trendy animals, like foxes.  That’s right – we think foxes will be the new meme, replacing owls as ‘the’ trend.  Watch for fox prints and lifestyle products of all sorts in the next couple of years.  We’ll know foxes have crested when they too get their own 3D movie.

And the whole equestrian lifestyle is interesting to us.  Possibly it is because we don’t have to drag ourselves out into the cold and muck out a horse stall at 5 am while a large quadruped is doing its best to maul us in search of snacks.  It’s amazing how having a horse step on your foot can really put you off your stride and think bleak thoughts about stall-bound trend setters.

We also like the direction fashion technology is taking, although we do have to admit to a lot of WTF moments every time we hear someone has Bluetooth-enabled a ski glove. No, this isn’t hot design, it’s fatuous.  Who in their right mind puts technology on the part of the body most like to slam into the ground at speed? The only thing less well thought out would be putting it on a ski boot.  Bluetooth can’t be compared to Timex, which could take a licking and keep on ticking.

Despite Haro’s Peter Shankman raving about the Scott E-vest and its popularity with the geek set, it’s still not really fashionable even if it is functional.  What we’d really like to see is wearable technology applied in a way that makes sense and actually enhances the fashion it is applied to.  Right now, what we’re seeing is a lot of gimmicky stuff that can’t be easily manufactured, it’s ugly, and there doesn’t seem to be any real point to it.  It appeases the tech set, though, so despite the ‘Fugly Factor’, we guess we’ll keep seeing this sort of thing.

Perhaps the most functional thing we’ve seen in fashion tech has been a hoodie with iPod cabling built in.  Plug your iPod into the outlet in the pocket, attach your earbuds to the wires in the hood, and away you go.  We wouldn’t be caught dead in a hoodie, but they are a major fashion statement amongst the iPod set.

One of the critical things prohibiting wider spread use of emerging technologies in apparel is the issue of power supply.  It’s a bit difficult to apply some particularly witty bit of technology to make a fashion statement when the frock or chapeau has to be plugged into a wall for power.  Fashion is still meant to be worn and seen, and it’s a bit tough to do that when you have to linger near a power outlet.  Changes in battery options, such as the further productization of thin-film batteries, will help fashion get past this need we have to not be tethered to a wall for juice.

So to recap emerging trends for 2011: green foxes wearing iPod-enabled hoodies emblazoned with equestrian prints.  You heard it here first.

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