Google just announced a new online shopping feature that leverages its new generative AI model developed by Google’s shopping AI researchers. The company introduced a virtual try-on (VTO) feature for apparel, which allows users to preview clothes on real models with different body shapes and sizes. This provides a more accurate representation of how the garments would look in reality. The objective of this AI model is to create lifelike portrayals of clothing on people. It takes into account essential details like draping, folding, clinging, stretching, and wrinkling. Unlike previous techniques that often resulted in visually defective and unrealistic images, Google’s VTO feature generates every pixel of a garment from scratch, ensuring high-quality and realistic representations, the company claimed in a blog post. To achieve this, Google’s researchers used a diffusion-based AI model. They gradually add extra pixels or “noise” to an image until it becomes unrecognisable, and then remove the noise to reconstruct the original image in perfect quality. They modified the diffusion approach for VTO by utilizing a pair of images—a garment image and an image of a person. Each image is fed into its own neural network, known as a U-net, and through a process called “cross-attention,”...