JANUARY sales have always struck me as a piece of bad timing. The biggest bargain hunt of the year, and what do we do before it starts? Slump in front of the telly for ten days and stuff ourselves rotten. By the time the doors open, it鈥檚 all we can do to waddle down the high street. Looking for half-price designer jeans in your usual size? Not likely. Not with your new waistline.
So instead of struggling to squeeze yourself into those jeans, why not get the trim, pre-Christmas you to try them on? All you need is a model of your former self to take with you to the sales. The technology isn鈥檛 quite ready, so don鈥檛 reach for that extra helping of pudding just yet, but in a couple of years you could be going shopping with your snake-hipped, pre-pudding double. Simply get yourself a full-body scan before Christmas, and your January embarrassments will be over. Well, not quite: the body map you receive will be rather revealing. Very revealing, in fact. It鈥檚 you in your birthday suit. In the altogether. Butt naked.
Yes, scientists have finally invented X-ray specs, or the next best thing-a machine that sees through your clothes.
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The 鈥�3-D Body Holo Scanner鈥� was created by researchers at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Washington. Their plan was to use it in airports, as the Federal Aviation Authority thought it would be a great idea to scan airline passengers for drugs, guns or explosives stashed under their clothes.
But there鈥檚 a problem. To spot any concealed weapons or bags of cocaine, the guard would have to take a good look at each person鈥檚 naked body. 鈥淚t鈥檚 not super-high resolution, but you can tell if someone is male or female,鈥� says Doug McMakin, a member of the PNNL team. This is hardly a tactful way to treat airline passengers, and after running a couple of field trials, the FAA got the willies. That left the researchers looking for a different use for their nifty new device.
They seem to have found it in retail. Body mapping isn鈥檛 a new idea in the fashion industry: ImageTwin of North Carolina already has a mobile scanner that drives from city to city, mapping people鈥檚 contours for American catalogue shopping company Land鈥檚 End. Their machine can鈥檛 see through clothes, so customers have to change into a body-hugging singlet before they get scanned. (Everyone gets a fresh singlet, in case you鈥檙e wondering.)
The beauty of the new scanner is that it can measure you up for a suit, a dress, a pair of trousers or even a bra, without you removing a stitch. The device will be housed in a circular booth about two metres across, rather like a stand-up solarium. You simply walk in and stand still for a few seconds. On the inside wall there鈥檚 a vertical boom studded with transmitters and sensors. This sweeps round the wall, beaming millimetre waves at you and recording the reflected signal (see Diagram).
Millimetre waves make up a narrow band of the electromagnetic spectrum, with wavelengths between 1 millimetre and 1 centimetre. These waves have a special property: they pass through fabric but rebound off flesh. So when they are fired at a fully clothed person, the waves that bounce back encode only the contours of their body. And it鈥檚 completely safe-unlike X-rays, millimetre waves don鈥檛 damage your DNA.
Some sophisticated software is needed to turn the information from the rebounding waves into a 3D model of the subject鈥檚 body. 鈥淭he software is the difficult bit,鈥� says Kathryn Harrison of CCR, another company that is using millimetre waves to scan people鈥檚 bodies. But once that 3D picture has been built up, it is simple to perform what鈥檚 known as z-axis slicing-chopping the virtual body into horizontal 鈥渟teaks鈥� to measure the girth of the chest, hips, neck, waistline and other critical bits.
CCR鈥檚 machine is a lab-based research tool, too unwieldy to put into shops. But Harrison sees no reason why scanning shouldn鈥檛 be popular with shoppers-as long as the results aren鈥檛 on show to all and sundry. How convenient it would be, she says, to have a swipe card with all your measurements, or those of your partner. You鈥檇 give these to the shop assistant and let them pick out the right size for you.
Catalogue shoppers and e-commerce sites will benefit most-when you can鈥檛 actually try the clothes on, these reliable and detailed measurements should give you a better fit than a few numbers read off a tape-measure. McMakin points out that scanned measurements would also be useful if you wanted made-to-measure clothes, or custom-built equipment such as a prosthetic limb or an ergonomic chair.
The PNNL team, meanwhile, is working on a fix for the privacy problem. One possibility is pattern-recognition software that could spot weapons, explosives and drugs without human help. If any dodgy shapes showed up, a computer could superimpose them on a generic human figure and display it to a security guard. But the software鈥檚 not up to scratch yet, and false alarms would be highly undesirable-there鈥檚 only so much frisking that an innocent passenger will put up with.
So the first place you鈥檙e likely to see an X-ray specs scanner is in a clothes shop. When you do, step inside and take a spin. It could save you a lot of angst in January. And it might be just the thing to get you back to the gym. What鈥檚 the point of a new pair of jeans if you can鈥檛 get them on?