Glasses direct blog

One major issue that lots of people have with trying glasses online is wondering what they’ll look like on your face.

At Glasses Direct we have the most advanced facial recognition software in the UK industry on our site – which we will be developing. Rather than you having to put glasses on your face, our software recognises your facial features and then fits a 3-D model of the glasses onto your face at the appropriate angle.

I grabbed a couple of photos of famous faces – particularly various incarnations of Arnie – to see how it would cope.

All of these have had the glasses added by our software on our site.

The Governator in some cowboy aviators

Conan the specs wearer in margaritas

He can see the predator better if he’s wearing his glasses (lennox £15)

Kate Bosworth looking very alluring in some slightly manly specs (lennox £15 again)

Britney looking super sexy in a pair of Paris

Ms Spears in some Livewires (£25)

Lilo looking good in a pair of Prague (£25)

Who else do you think we should try?

Have a go yourself at www.glassesdirect.co.uk/virtual_mirror.

Try yourself, your mates, or any other celebs you think should be ‘specced’. Send us in any images you end up with.

Our lead developer found it even worked for his cat, but our head of IT had less joy with a picture of a dog.

Picture by tahir

A massive milestone in our company’s development happened today

Hats off to the IT guys who made it happen, who are now bleary eyed and clutching Eat Breakfast rolls.

If you visited the website from 11pm-12pm you will have noticed an ‘out to lunch message’ instead of the homepage. In fact, the lights were on in our offices above Baker Street until 4am as the ‘classic’ website which has served us since 2004 was relegated and the website we referred to as ‘Beta’ became the new Glasses Direct.

What you see now as our website represents a significant step forward in customer experience . Here are my top 5 new features:

1. Our Virtual Mirror software. Developed in France by our brilliant facial recognition experts – what you see online now represents the pinnacle of innovation in try-on technology. The most exciting bit is that what’s live now is actually just the first iteration and there is much, much more to come. 3D try-on and exact measurement scaling is only a breath away, so watch this space.

2. More categories – you can now shop for glasses in many different ways. On the high street you look at shelves marked ‘semi-rimless, rimless, designer etc’ but not everyone wants to shop for glasses using those categories. Now we let you shop by gender, price, material, lens type, whether they are rock ‘n roll glasses, designer brand – and many more which we are still working on such as face shape.

3. Reviews, videos, measurements, data – we give you much more information than you will ever find on the high street about our products. No sales rep in Specsavers can furnish you with the amount of data the web can…. And we’re building up a library of it. You will soon find celebrities who wear similar pairs of glasses to the one you’re looking at, staff reviews from GD, and also we are going to let you know in more detail what other customers are buying. I particularly like the bendable video David did to illustrate the indestructibility of those frames. More to come

4. Inputting your prescription and choosing lenses. We have undoubtedly the most advanced system to prompt you and help you as you enter your prescription and choose lenses. We’ve been on our backs underneath the car since day one, fiddling with the nuts and bolts, chopping and changing and finding the best way we can help you to checkout. 4 years of experience is rolled into this new order process and we hope that you like it. Because it’s not exactly simple –all this – and our mission is to make it so.

5. This blog! David and Ran are the mainstays of this blog, doing a fine job producing great articles. Keep checking and contributing.

There is so much more that goes behind the website –which tracks your glasses through the laboratory, which gives our customer service teams the information they need when you call, that tells us how many pairs we have left till we run out….. but today represents a big big step forward for the front-end customer experience. Round of applause for the David Carruthers, Head of User Experience and the IT team that made it all happen!