Naked Labs' body scanner review: 3D body maps are great and circumference estimates are accurate, but body fat % differs greatly from hydrostatic test results
Naked Labs' body scanner does a great job creating a 3-D model of your nearly naked body, but just how far are you willing to let technology go? Tweets: @joannastern Tweets: Joanna Stern / @joannastern : Career highlight: Walking the Naked Cowboy through the @WSJ newsroom. All is revealed in this video: https://on.wsj.com/2Pi6xEi pic.twitter.com/3mAS33AR0P
Context & Ripple Effects
Naked Labs first unveiled its mirror-and-scale 3D Fitness Tracker back in 2016 at a $500 preorder price, promising to scan your body and track changes over time. Two years later, the Wall Street Journal has finally put the shipping product through real testing — walking the Naked Cowboy through the newsroom included — and the verdict splits the promise in two.
The timing matters because the body-modeling space is consolidating around big platforms: Amazon bought 3D body model startup Body Labs for a reported $50M-$70M and has since been working to predict how clothes will fit online. A credible independent review of what consumer-grade scanning can and can't measure sets the accuracy bar for everyone building on body data.
First-order effects
- Consumers weighing a $500 purchase now know the split verdict: circumference estimates track hydrostatic testing closely, but body fat percentage readings diverge significantly from the lab gold standard — so the device is defensible for measuring change over time, not for an authoritative fat number.
- Naked Labs' marketing claim effectively narrows: the review validates the 3D visualization and girth measurements while undercutting any clinical framing of its body fat output.
Second-order effects
- Amazon's body-model investments look better positioned by this review: if cheap consumer scanners can nail circumferences but not composition, platform efforts to predict clothing fit from body geometry have a clearer technical lane than body-fat-based health claims.
- Rival home health devices inherit a raised credibility bar — reviewers are now benchmarking consumer gadgets against hydrostatic testing, the same invasive-versus-payoff critique that later greeted Amazon's own $100 Halo Band.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, consumer body scanning settles into a 'relative tracking' category — devices trusted for trends, not diagnostics — while absolute composition measurement stays with clinical methods, shaping how regulators and buyers treat at-home health claims.
- The normalization of near-naked household scanning, reviewed approvingly despite the privacy cost, points toward body data becoming routine consumer telemetry — exactly the territory Amazon's acquisitions suggest it intends to occupy.
The trend: Consumer 3D body scanning is maturing from novelty hardware into a tracked-health data layer, with accuracy limits pushing the category toward change-over-time metrics and big platforms like Amazon positioning around body models.