Google announced on Thursday that it is expanding its AI-powered virtual try-on tool to include support for dresses. Users can now try on thousands of dresses from hundreds of brands, including Boden, Maje, Sandro, Simkhai and Staud.

Dressed was one of the most sought apparel categories for the tool, according to the company. However, as Google explained in today's blog post, its current diffusion technique is not easy to use with dresses, since these are more detailed and complex clothing items.

To better explain the situation, Google Shopping launched the tool last year. They employed their diffusion technology for creating high-quality, lifelike images of tops and blouses. The tool simulates how real clothing would drape, fold, cling, and form wrinkles and shadows on people in a series of poses.

Because of the complexity of details in dresses, the current diffusion model failed to portray the detailed print of the dress effectively such as floral or geometric designs. Even though it could process images at lower resolutions, other methods would be necessary for dresses so that crucial details are not lost. In a bid to overcome this challenge, Google claimed it had designed a new training approach based on lower resolutions and incrementally added higher resolutions.

Additionally, since dresses are usually full-body covering garments coming in different lengths, such as mini, midi, and maxi, superposition of a virtual dress on the person's body usually reduces or obliterates details of the body. The VTO-UNet Diffusion Transformer or VTO-UDiT is proposed to successfully eliminate the difficulties of ensuring that the dress is exactly erased while leaving the person's features well-preserved, which ends up accurately representing both the dress and the person wearing it.

Virtual try-on technology is the innovation that may help to dispose of the guesswork for all customers' body types when it comes to finding the right fit. Several companies, including Adobe, Amazon, and Walmart, have launched their versions of the tools, enabling customers to virtually try on all kinds of clothing, from dresses to whatever else. However, the new expansion seems to indicate that Google is after something more than a catching feature its competitors have come up with.