OK, app, what should I wear to this wedding?

WEDDINGS, first dates, job interviews... the days of agonising over what to wear may soon be over.

Magic Closet, a clothing-selection system developed at the Chinese Academy of Science and the National University of Singapore, suggests clothing from your own wardrobe based on the event you plan to attend. First, it catalogues your clothes, using a Microsoft Kinect camera to identify defining features such as sleeve length, colour and collar type. Then, when you ask it for an outfit, the software selects the best matches from its database of 25,000 outfit images, skimmed from online shopping websites and photo-sharing site Flickr - and presents pictures of its selected items of your clothing.

Those database images had been fed into Amazon's Mechanical Turk labour market, where online workers categorised the outfits by attributes like collar type. They also determined if the pictured clothes were more suitable for some occasions - a first date, say - than others, such as a wedding. An attribute or occasion was deemed legitimate when more than half the workers agreed.

As well as help people decide what to wear, the system can also help online shoppers find clothes that go with what they already own. The team is now working on adding personal taste to the model.

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