Who hasn’t dealt with the frustration of hauling four different sizes to the dressing room because of ridiculous discrepancies in fit from brand to brand? Probably 99.9% of us have dealt with this maddening reality. Now, a New York-based company called Body Labs hopes to make that a distant memory — by commercializing its cutting-edge 3-D body-modeling technology (which is an advanced upgrade on mere 3-D body scanning).Earlier this month, Body Labs raised $8 million in Series A funding (so get ready to hear more about its body-modeling wizardry in the near future). The company began in the early aughts at Brown University’s computer vision lab; then, it continued at Germany’s Max Planck Institute. Though the company doesn’t exclusively address the fashion industry, it has been a focus since Body Labs' inception: “When research started in the early 2000s, e-commerce was just booming, but no one knew how to handle the returns problem. People were suddenly not trying things on before buying them,” says Flo McDavid, director of business development at Body Labs. Brands therefore started having a harder time sussing out how specific designs fit customers’ bodies.When Body Labs was founded in 2013, there was an “input problem” in terms of being able to get the necessary quantities of data, because people didn’t own body scanners, and the scanners on the market were “massive” and “cost tens of thousands of dollars,” McDavid says. So Body Labs worked with entities that could afford to buy huge body scanners to fine-tune their body-modeling fit abilities. (It also worked with the U.S. Army to design Kevlar vests specifically for women.)In just two brief years, technology has changed markedly and 3-D sensors have become very compact and affordable. Body Labs’ clients today include apparel and e-commerce brands ranging in scale from Fortune 500 companies to start-ups in their formative phases.