As a vaguely red-blooded male, I find clothes shopping pretty dull. Especially if I’m not shopping for myself. And the peril of buying the wrong thing in the wrong size constantly looms on the horizon. Luckily, help is at hand from two excellent new services.

The first is knickerpicker.com, which makes buying underwear for your ladyfriend a whole lot easier. Once you have chosen  from the catalogue, you can then select one of five models to strut their stuff for you. The models come in various different dress and cup sizes so you can get a good idea of what your wife/girlfriend/mistress/grandma will look like. And you can even create your own personal catwalk to view on lonely winter nights embed on your site like below. Which is nice.

The other shopping tool is called Fashionista on Tobi.com, and makes great use of AR to let you see what a dress would look like on you from the comfort of your own living room. Which means you can avoid that weird smell of sweat, Glade and other people’s feet which all changing rooms have.

Knickerpicker found on Interactive Marketing Trends.

Fashionista found on Digital Buzz Blog.

Augmented reality. The technology that everyone and his nan has spent the last year trying to force their clients to buy into. Some stuff is great (file under ‘Doritos’, ‘IBM Wimbledon’ and ‘USPS’), but most of it is pointless shit. And so when I first saw the BMW Z4 campaign, I found myself positioned precariously between two equally-comfortable stools:

• Stool 1 - Wow, I’ve got a ringside seat at the future. I can make pretty patterns on my desk. I can park a beautifully-rendered 3D car in between my stapler and yesterday’s coffee mug. Awesome.
• Stool 2 – Am I really going to play with this more than once? What can I actually do with it? Is it helpful in any way. shape or form? No.

But all of that stool-balancing (which sounds like a fetish sport played in certain towns in Germany) has now come to an end. Because this new twist on the campaign is bloomin’ brilliant:

Simple, fun and playful. Love it.