What Balenciaga's Afterworld: The Age of Tomorrow tells us about the future of fashion

 

Virtual worlds unlock infinite possibilities 

Afterworld represents a new way of thinking about identity in the digital world—that the internet can be a rich, interactive, three-dimensional virtual playground for fashion. An immersive adventure set in a city in the near future of 2031, the game enables players to pick from a range of characters before exploring different zones, passing models and pieces from Balenciaga’s Fall 2021 collection along the way.

It’s a thought-provoking way to showcase clothing—and one that represents the start of major fashion brands becoming awake to the creative possibilities unlocked by new technologies.

His team used Unreal Engine to build the game environment, setting up the functionality of the game quickly and easily using the engine’s Blueprint visual scripting system, and populating the world with photorealistic 3D scans from Quixel’s Megascan library. “Unreal Engine was made for this type of work,” he says. 

Streamline also did the initial R&D to establish a baseline of what was possible and at what quality level, weighing up the technological constraints against Gvasalia’s expansive vision. 

It was responsible for bringing volumetrically captured digital models created by Dimension Studios into Unreal Engine, as well as building the different levels of the game and populating them with vehicles, background characters, and animals.  

Simon Windsor is Co-Founder and Joint Managing Director at Dimension Studios. He’s worked at the cutting-edge of immersive and extended reality (XR) content, technology, and storytelling for over 10 years. Windsor led the team at Dimension Studios that created 50 digital models for Afterworld using the state of the art in volumetric filming, thought to be the largest volumetric video project ever undertaken, using the Polymotion Stage—a collaboration between Dimension Studios, Nikon, and MRMC.

These 4D digital models act as game characters throughout the five levels of Afterworld. Dimension authentically recreated the look and motion of the garments the characters wear by capturing them volumetrically using Microsoft Mixed Reality Capture technology. 

These assets were then encoded into a compact, streamable form. To facilitate their use, Microsoft provides a plugin to Unreal Engine enabling volumetric assets to easily be integrated into Unreal Engine projects to take full advantage of its advanced rendering pipeline. “The convergence of volumetric capture and Unreal Engine was perfectly timed for Balenciaga to push the boundaries with Afterworld,” says Windsor. 

 
The project gave Windsor the opportunity to explore an idea that has captured his imagination for a long time: that content and the web will evolve from traditional screens and blend into our physical world, with virtual worlds and the Metaverse co-existing. 

He likens Afterworld to the OASIS, a virtual universe that serves as the primary escape for the population in Ready Player One. “Balenciaga’s Afterworld is an example of an exclusive, curated experience, but one that’s available to anyone around the world,” he explains. “It allows the brand to do much more than a traditional lookbook or even an in-person fashion show.”

What Balenciaga has realized—and what other fashion houses are catching on to—is that immersive and interactive experiences will eventually be commonplace, both online and on the highstreet of the future. 

It’s a point not lost on Fernandez. “Digital humans and virtual worlds are just a first step for fashion and brands in general,” he says. “It’s not hard to see what comes next with trying on clothes or seeing yourself represented in the world.”

For him, that could be a melding of fashion with virtual worlds, where product discovery, commerce, and social interactivity provide the opportunity to go shopping with friends located on the other side of the world—while also seeing the latest fashions. “It’s going to be great,” he says.

These possibilities include everything from enabling new dynamic virtual camera angles for sports broadcasters or volumetric extras in virtual production for filmmaking, to creating interactive 4D immersive musical experiences. “As these technologies continue to converge, so we'll see even more creative magic happen,” says Windsor. 
 

The Metaverse is coming—and fashion can thrive in it

As he looks to the future, Windsor predicts digital fashion will be a thriving hub of creativity. “The Metaverse, the holodeck—whatever you call it, vast persistent virtual worlds are coming and fashion brands will live and thrive creatively in these bold new worlds,” he says. “As our digital personas evolve beyond social media and digital expression as we know it, manifesting in our own virtual avatars that become a natural extension of who we are—or want to be—in the Metaverse, so we’ll see the virtual economy for fashion boom.”

Fernandez predicts that the evolution of virtual worlds will have huge implications over the next twenty years, resulting in worlds completely driven by brands. “The entire concept of design, luxury, and service will be redefined by video games,” he says.