L’Oreal taps 8i to create holographic tutorials for VR and AR
In some ways the biggest beauty company in the world thinks like a startup. We heard from L’Oreal’s VP of Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Rachel Weiss, at the Fast Company Innovation Festival what it means to be an “intraprenauer” and fostering a culture of innovation.
Sharing the stage with 8i cofounder and CEO Linc Gasking, Weiss shared how her team at L’Oreal set out to identify business challenges that need to be solved across the company’s brands, and find new technologies and partners to experiment with in order to try to solve for these problems.
L’Oreal sought out 8i and its holographic technology for VR and AR as a way to innovate and evolve the way the company communicates with customers, which include both consumers and beauty professionals — who “are also consumers” as Weiss points out. The first area they focused on is education and training, specifically in the hair industry. Last year alone, L’Oreal trained more than 2 million hairdressers globally — that’s quite a bit of travel — so the potential impact of making training by top educators more accessible is quite substantial.
At yesterday’s event, Weiss and Gasking announced a partnership between 8i and L’Oréal USA to bring a unique first-to-market hair education program for salon stylists that will launch with their professional hair care brand, Matrix. Since 8i enables truly 3D photorealistic holograms for VR or AR, the viewer can move around the trainer and model to observe from any angle, and even literally step into the trainer’s body (or hologram) to get a first person view. This provides a sense of presence for the viewer as if they were physically in the salon.
You can read more about our partnership with L’Oreal in Fast Company.
