Online shopping makes our lives easier, more convenient, and sometimes even safer, as the pandemic years have shown. But as e-commerce grows, so do user expectations: it’s no longer enough to see a few photos of a product. We want to know how the clothes will fit us or how a sofa will look in our living room. When a major retailer offers that kind of experience, their sales naturally go up.
Dmytro Kyrylov, an experienced Creative Graphic Engineer and Designer, has spent years creating AR and Generative AI solutions for leading brands that want to make virtual try-ons their competitive advantage. His work includes virtual eyewear for online stores, AR car postcards, 3D makeup holograms, and other products that users can try directly through their smartphones without leaving home. Dmytro believes that such experiences are the future of retail. In this article, he explains how they directly drive brand growth.
The Traditional Challenges of 3D in Retail
The idea of virtual try-ons first emerged in the 1990s, but the first real prototypes didn’t appear until decades later. For designers and engineers, it was always a demanding task: creating a 3D model with manually built textures, shapes, and animations could take hours or even days, not to mention the time required to integrate and test those models on AR devices. For a long time, there were no standardized 3D asset management systems, which made collaboration between specialists working on the same project difficult.
“I remember the time before the GenAI boom, it wasn’t that long ago,” recalls Dmytro Kyrylov. “In the e-commerce virtual try-on space, the primary bottleneck has consistently been manual 3D asset production. Creating a production-grade asset typically requires many hours of work, driving costs to levels that are prohibitive for small and mid-sized brands and sellers, while also significantly extending quality-control timelines.” In his view, the era of generative AI has been a real breakthrough for AR try-ons: what used to take hours now takes seconds, and production budgets have dropped significantly. The technology has become democratized and accessible to smaller brands.
GenAI also directly impacts customer satisfaction. According to ResearchGate, the use of AI and automation in retail increases user engagement with brands by 15%, speeds up order completion by 25%, and reduces inventory holding costs by 20%. When AR try-ons are easy to implement and available to every shopper, they directly boost conversion rates and reduce the likelihood of future returns.
Generative AI as a Game-Changer
Dmytro Kyrylov has repeatedly used GenAI in creating AR try-ons. One of the most notable cases is the Shopify Glasses Try-On Plugin. Dmytro worked on the MVP, which his team of developers and designers later completed under his leadership. Thanks to integrated Geenee tools, Shopify customers can generate 3D models of selected eyewear from the catalog in just seconds. With the virtual try-on feature, users can instantly see how well a design suits them and place an order right away. For brands, this is valuable not only as an engaging AR showcase but also as a way to create product models internally — without spending money on outsourcing design and 3D development each time.
Another successful GenAI-powered AR try-on project featured volumetric video for L’Oréal. Users could watch a short tutorial and then flip their camera to see how the makeup would look on their own faces. Instead of using physical testers, shoppers can virtually try on eyeliner or lipstick in a convenient app and purchase the exact shade that fits them.
A third example is an interactive AR installation at The Female Quotient event during the Cannes Lions Film Festival, titled “Women in the Metaverse,” allowed participants to create a 3D avatar in real time using just one selfie. Guests were then able to interact with their avatars and dance with them in an augmented reality mirror — a memorable interactive experience powered by AI.
“These technologies are changing the familiar path of how we integrate 3D into brands,” Dmytro says. “Some might think GenAI takes jobs away from modelers and engineers, but I believe it’s going to make our work easier and open new skill paths. After all, brands keep expanding, people’s expectations grow, and we can’t spend hours building models in Blender anymore — we also have to evolve.”
Transforming the U.S. E-Commerce Ecosystem
The results of GenAI adoption are truly impressive. In some cases, generating a 3D model now takes just a few seconds instead of several hours. When users can interact with products quickly and seamlessly, their purchasing decisions also become faster and more confident.
“In my work, I’ve often noticed how product returns drop after integrating different optimization features — especially when AR experiences are involved. The technology isn’t yet widespread, so brands that move early have a real chance to surprise and retain their audiences. Later, virtual try-ons will become a daily norm,” says Dmytro Kyrylov.
According to the creative designer, this is a goldmine for U.S. e-commerce. The country already generates the largest share of AR and VR revenue, with a projected market volume of $12.6 billion by 2025. Major brands can adopt GenAI-powered AR solutions to lead the industry and shape a stronger market overall. As for the job landscape, these technologies are also creating new roles that combine AI and traditional modeling — a field still small today but expected to grow rapidly in the coming years.
Conclusion: Where Shopping Meets Intelligence
AI try-ons are bringing us closer to the kind of future we once saw only in sci-fi movies. Dmytro Kyrylov has become one of the builders of that future. He believes that combining GenAI and AR to create virtual fitting tools makes the user experience seamless while saving brands both time and money on implementation. As the global leader in AR-driven revenue, the U.S. is well-positioned to lead this shift from traditional 3D modeling to modern, accelerated design powered by GenAI. And helping drive this transformation will be designers, modelers, and developers who master these new technologies.
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