Tight pants? Slide under a dressing-room laser

Tired of poorly fitting clothes? Textile Clothing Technology (TC2) can help. The nonprofit research corporation has created a body scanner that records precise body measurements for a made-to-fit garment. And it thinks it might have found the cure for dressing-room blues. "The scanner has two really basic purposes, one is to help you predict the best ready-to-wear size and the other is for mass customization - to have garments created specifically for you or me," says Melanie Pittman, manager of marketing and member relations of TC2. The 3-D body scanner is 12-feet wide and 20-feet long. Six cameras mounted on towers capture flashes of white light to map a 3-D "point cloud" - 300,000 data points in space defining the body's skin. In 53 seconds, a computer program interprets the data points, displays an image, and prints out detailed measurements. The scanner's $100,000 price tag, however, may put it out of the reach of most - just four have been sold this year.

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