By : Matthew Lynley (@mattlynley)
Looking for outfits and what to wear is one of the bigger use cases on Pinterest, but as the company looks to try to make the process of getting the right content to users more seamless, it’s been increasingly focusing on its interface with the real world with the camera.
Now the company is going a step further in tapping that big use case by letting Pinterest users tap the camera’s visual search technology with clothes that are already in their closet as they decide what they want to wear today. Instead of searching for clothing options with ripped jeans, users can now point their camera at their pair of ripped jeans. They type in a kind of search — say “outfits for the beach” — and then point their camera to dive deeper into that rabbit hole with a specific product they already own. Pinterest will then execute a visual search on those jeans, and users can tap around and see various kinds of outfits that might interest them.
“The way lenses work, you take a picture of something and we try to match the picture with all the images that are most similar,” visual search product lead Jeff Harris said. “What we’ve done with Lens Your Look is taken a step deeper. We looked within our fashion pins with all the articles of clothing that are represented of that outfit. We’re not looking for whole pins with jean jackets, we’re looking for outfits where a small part is a jean jacket. It’s a good match for the 20 pixels that are a jean jacket. What we can do with combining text and visual search. Text is a clear signal, they want an outfit, that really narrows it.”
