Iridis AI is my passion project I started two years ago. It was founded due to my frustration with fast fashion and my desire to share my love of clothing design with more people. After working with collaborating with a team at MIT on their ethically-trained AI-generated fashion illustrations, I was inspired to do something similar with machine learning. I found that while interesting, generating illustrations was not all that helpful. I was excited by the possibility of a model which could take a photo of someone's flat sketch and generate the 2D sewing pattern needed to create a 3D garment. I researched this project for about a year, creating my website, developing wireframes, and talking to people online about it. I needed a way to create my MVP rather than immediately trying to train an incredibly complicated model. Because it will take years to build something capable of automatically generating patterns, I decided to start with a lower-barrier prototype. For the last year, I have been working on building a reverse image search engine that allows a user to upload their sketch and be connected with the closing existing sewing pattern for sale. The prototype will be launched in early 2023.
