The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco installed three augmented reality mirrors at the de Young museum for its exhibition Fashioning San Francisco: A Century of Style, which ran from 20 January to 11 August 2024. The installation was built with Snap Inc., which was credited as the exhibition's AR Partner, and marked the first time Snap's AR Mirrors had been deployed in a US museum.
The exhibition drew on the museums' costume and textile holdings to present work by more than 50 designers, from Balmain and Dior to Miyake and McQueen, with most ensembles on public view for the first time. Because the garments are fragile collection objects that no visitor could ever wear, the AR mirrors were used to give the audience a way to experience them on their own bodies.
Visitors stepped onto a marked spot in front of a full-length screen, which showed a live camera image of them with a three-dimensional recreation of a historic ensemble rendered onto their body. Three garments were available: an Yves Saint Laurent little black dress from 1955, a Kaisik Wong ensemble from 1985, and a Valentino Garavani ball gown from 1987. The garments were reconstructed in detail from the originals and simulated as cloth, so sashes and skirts moved as the wearer moved, and the system fitted each ensemble to different body sizes, shapes and genders rather than compositing a fixed cutout. The curatorial team also commissioned distinct audio for each garment, so the Saint Laurent dress produced light chiming tones and the Kaisik Wong ensemble a rush of sound as it appeared. With a tap, visitors could send the resulting image to their own phone.
Snap describes the AR Mirrors as an AR technology stack built for physical screens, capturing a real-time camera image and compositing augmented content onto it, combined with 3D body tracking and cloth simulation. The de Young installation ran for the full duration of the exhibition and closed with it.
