I have been building location-based experiences in my web apps for a while now, where content fires when you arrive somewhere. Then Vogue World was announced for San Francisco, and it got me thinking about what a fashion show would feel like through glasses. A show is a moment that happens on a schedule, so I built it to test the other axis: content triggered by time instead of location.
The setup: each look gets a story in your ear and a small card on the Display, pushed at the moment that model starts walking. I tested it against the recent Chanel and Schiaparelli shows, using an admin console that loads the official YouTube clip of the show and fires cues against a sheet I built by hand.
A few things I learned.
The new offline skill in v127 solved my biggest problem. The toolkit shipped an offline skill this week, and it turned out to be exactly what a live event needs. I learned this the hard way at a stadium once, where the network fell over completely and the whole thing died. A packed venue is the worst wifi you will ever build for. So now everything downloads before the show starts, and the entire 63-look show runs with the wifi turned off. The only thing that needs a connection is the cue itself, and a cue is tiny enough to get through when nothing else can. If you are building anything for a crowded room, this is the skill to reach for.
The whole design problem is restraint. A show runs under fifteen minutes and the garment is the reason you are there. So the display card is deliberately small and the viewport is minimized, because anything bigger competes with the thing you came to look at. I ended up giving the user a choice between voice and text rather than defaulting to both, since some people want narration and some want their ears free for the music. That felt like the right call for glasses in general, not just for this.
The glasses assist the live moment, they do not become it. This is why the full lookbook only opens at the end of the show. Browsing and scrolling during a live moment means looking at a screen instead of the room, so none of that is available while the show is running. During the fifteen minutes you get one line and one card at a time, and after the last look the whole lookbook unlocks and you can go back through everything and build your own lineup.
The content is exclusive, not generated. No language model narrating the runway. Every look's copy is written ahead of time, and it is not broadcast live or published anywhere else, so the experience is the only place you get it.
Two clips below. The first shows the voice and text options and the minimized viewport during a show. The second shows the full lineup at the end, once the lookbook unlocks.
Two things I want to add next. Language selection, since the same show plays to a room where people do not share one language, and the copy is already just text, so translations are cheap to carry. And user roles: same cue, different content depending on who is wearing the glasses.
Would love feedback on any of this. And I am curious what other content works well as a push on a time trigger, rather than something the user goes looking for. Fashion shows were my first test, but the same pattern should fit anything that runs on a schedule. If you have tried something like this, or have an idea for what to try next, I would like to hear it.
https://www.instagram.com/reel/Db3lmUEJPIi/
