Augmented reality metaverse Over is planning a fashion and tech takeover of the Piazza del Duomo in Milan on March 31, with a hybrid fashion show and other events on the closing day of Decentraland’s Metaverse Fashion Week, the corporate announced early Saturday morning. Over, also often called OVR, is considered one of the cohosts of MVFW.

With support from the Municipality of Milan, the event will happen IRL as a featured attraction of MVFW with brands spanning emerging and established fashion firms, including Gucci Vault x Pet Liger, Pinko, Balmain x Space Runners’ Unicorn NFT collection, Ilona Song x Vogue Singapore, Ecoolska and XR Couture participating in talks, presentations or the hybrid runway show.

Attendees will have the option to observe as a digital avatar wearing, as an example, a glance from Gucci Vault’s latest collaboration bounds down the physical catwalk by simply lifting their smartphones and viewing the motion on their screens.

A vital part of creating that work is that the virtual fashions, as digital assets, are geo-located to the space, said Over’s David Carr, head of partnerships.

“The Over metaverse is, at its foundational level, this digital layer that has been mapped over the physical earth. And we’ve got over a trillion hexagons, which represent parcels of digital land,” he told WWD. “Now, what Over has done is to take over the land that sits above, the layer that sits over the Piazza, and so they have programmed or geo-located the content to that map of that parcel of land on the Over platform.”

The approach will feel familiar to anyone who ever played an AR game on their phone, corresponding to Pokémon Go or Ingress, which layers digital objects over the camera’s view of the physical world as in the event that they were tangibly present.

“Whenever you activate the app through an iPad or a smartphone, you possibly can see the content because it’s been localized to the space,” continued Carr. “So wherever you’re standing within the Piazza — if you happen to’re standing up on the terrace where the invited guests will probably be standing — they’ll see the content move from left to right. Someone standing across the opposite side of the piazza would see the content moving from right to left.”

The AR metaverse fashion show, as a tech spectacle, will certainly grab attention, but Over can be packing other elements into the agenda, including a keynote address by Marco Ruffa, Pinko’s digital transformation director, a featured AR experience by Bored Apes and CryptoPunks and a panel talk with speakers from Marangoni, Municipality of Milan, Polygon and PwC Italy.

“Fashion was among the many first industries to acknowledge the incredible potential of the metaverse and Web 3.0,” said Davide Cuttini, Over’s chief executive officer and cofounder. “It’s because of the numerous avenues that these domains open up for fashion, from design to retail. Over extends this horizon further by uniquely merging the virtual and physical worlds using augmented reality.

“Together, these present a large opportunity for brands, designers and retailers to achieve consumers, anytime and anywhere.”

Over can be organizing a cross-metaverse creator contest, for fashion designers creating avatar wearables that work in each Over and Decentraland.

It’s all a part of MVFW 2023’s most important theme of “Future Heritage.” The umbrella concept juxtaposes tradition and innovation, physical and digital, uniqueness and interoperability, with a concentrate on digital-physical crossovers and cross-metaverse efforts.

While critics have been mentioning all of the ways the metaverse appears to be on the wane, not less than as a cultural phenomenon, the technology and approaches are still evolving. A method forward is to concentrate on augmented reality, and AR was at all times mentioned as a part of the metaverse, even when there have been few concrete examples of how it will connect with the virtual world. In that light, Over, as an immersive, decentralized platform with an AR spin, looks like a step in a productive direction and adds intriguing latest scenarios.

On the very least, it allows the partners — Decentraland, Over and Spatial, the third MVFW cohost — to bring something latest to the general public. The trio are out to top last yr, when enthusiasm ran high and the event attracted 108,000 guests and channeled 165,000 wearables. Those aren’t huge figures, but it surely could also be difficult to beat them nonetheless, as enthusiasm wanes.

Their stated goal now, in response to the announcement, is to “translate the multivenue experience of fashion month into the virtual realm,” in response to the announcement, and that features AR projects. But is that enough to reinvigorate interest in all things metaverse? That ought to turn out to be evident next week.

Metaverse Fashion Week gets underway on Tuesday.