Carverse

Carverse takes the phenomenal experience of purchasing a car on carmax.com to a whole new level. It's a virtual car dealership where buyers interact and check out cars before finalizing deals.

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Inspiration

Our drive and passion for constant innovation in e-commerce fit right in with one of the Sponsor Challenges. We believe Virtual Reality has several applications in e-commerce and can be used to improve car dealerships in the not-so-distant future.

What it does

Carverse is a virtual dealership where buyers can interact with cars before making deals. We make use of virtual reality to ease the stressful online shopping process. Having the ability to view cars before purchasing them allows for quicker and more confident decisions. That’s what the Carverse is.

How we built it

Carverse is developed along with Unity and C#. The simulation is made in Unity and the back-end for controls and catalog is written with C#. Together Python and C# will be used to web-scrape carmax.com for data regarding the cars and this data is used to display the cars on the catalog.

Challenges we ran into

Working with VR and Unity gets complicated quickly due to the lack of documentation for Unity with VR. Documentation is a developer's best friend and having limited documentation is challenging at times.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Along with repeated 4 a.m. debugging sprints and a lot of caffeine, detailed workflows helped us overcome the lack of relevant documentation. We are proud of the things we learned along the way and our work as a team. We truly believe that our prototype could be scaled-up and brought in the market to entertain customers and ease the stressful process of buying a car.

What we learned

Integrating VR with Unity and simulation development in Unity with real world data. We also learnt developing models with Blender. Project management, experience and improved team efficiency and turn around time.

What's next for Carverse

  1. Specifications and details of the car (engine details, transmission details, navigation system, facilities, etc.) will be displayed in pop-ups upon interactions with the simulated car.
  2. Also on our to-do list is adding a salesman (AI digital assistant) who assists customers looking for the right car. He/she will be optional to our customers (we get annoyed by salesmen sometimes too!)
  3. Add-ons to the cars along with the additional price will be displayed in the simulation for those customers who’d like to upgrade their new purchase off the bat!
  4. Having the ability to test-drive in a simulation is on our agenda. Every customer would love to take his soon-to-be new car for a spin. We look forward to expanding on our prototype with specific company requirements.

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