Baume & Mercier

The maison Baume & Mercier

Founded in 1830, Baume & Mercier perpetuates the excellence of Swiss watchmaking with its 190 years of know-how. The brand has created a place of choice in the market by offering its consumers elaborate designs and by putting timelessness and creativity at the center of their pieces.

The Riviera watch

The Baume & Mercier Riviera is a watch first presented in 1973. This year, the House presents the renewal of this collection. Hallmark of an era, this watch is declined in several configurations with an assertive style. The House has trusted us to create with them a virtual try-on experience online, proving once again, that this watch is reinventing itself to fit the codes of its time.

Functionalities

The functionalities we set have to allow the brand to offer its online customers a virtual try-on of the Riviera watch in real time. Thus after visualizing the product page, they can see how it could look on their wrist thanks to their smartphone camera. We give a special attention to the following points : - Realistic & qualitative visual rendering - The experience must correspond to the brand identity - Fluid, practical and easy experience - Journey available without any mobile app needed, directly in the browser.

We model 15 watches variations for the brand, to represent the possibilities of the New Riviera collection. This modeling project has one particularity : it has to be adapted to the virtual try-on experience. Adapting the form of the strap to fit the wrist during the try-on, for example is part of the optimisations we made.

The rendering is also specific in order to result in a qualitative rendering on the wrist try-on experience. Thus, we first focus ourselves on the materials : metal and rubber for the straps and a custom material creation for the dial. We create a tailor-made material for the solarized dial in order to best represent the effects of transparency and light. In some variations it is completely transparent to show the watch mechanism. Then, we work on the lighting and find a compromise between the initial artistic direction set for a soldier view and a lighting adapted to a view on the wrist.

Then we implement our Virtual Try-On feature to allow the Baume & Mercier’s website visitors to try the watches virtually. It is a try-on without markers, in real time directly available in every browser. In concrete terms, this means that they can see the watch on their wrist through their camera, move their arm and even move around while seeing how the watch would look.

Making this project for a try-on experience involves several optimisations & adaptations. The models have to be adjusted to stay realistic on the wrist and the rendering (light, shadows, …) also. The weight of the models have also to be optimised and be as light as possible to guarantee a fluid latency-free virtual experience. Then the integration part is also different and requires a particular attention.