Commerce Reality

INSPIRATION

Imagine buying a car. You spend days walking through different dealerships, days talking to multiple salesmen, and you waste time finding a car. People spend hours walking in IKEA
Many of the things we shop for don't require that we think about them in the context of where we will use them. When you are shopping for a new laptop or a phone, you may care about the hardware specifications of the device relative to its competition; you might even care if it has a glossy metallic finish instead of a less attractive plastic shell. You likely won't care if it looks good sitting on the kitchen table or worry if it will fit in your backpack. Many of the things we shop for do have this problem though, and they're often the things that give us the biggest headaches. Have you ever gone furniture shopping and struggled to visualize how well a particular couch will fit into your living room? Even with a good tape measure, it can be challenging to form a mental picture of how well it will fit. Most couches have odd angles and protrusions that can affect perceived size. It might leave less room for walking than you previously imagined. What about TVs? Would the 65 inch TV that you really want look just completely overbearing? What about a 40 inch? Is it too small? The goal of Commerce-Reality is to allow you to more easily answer those questions within the context of your own space.

WHAT IT DOES

Commerce reality is a virtual/augmented reality app for online shopping. It allows you to browse for merchandise in an online store, and then project those items into your home in fule scale. This allows you to see if that couch you were looking at really does fit along that wall in your living room, or if it sticks out just a little too much.
With this app you can look through the online store, and view the items directly, or tag them so you can view them later.

HOW WE BUILT IT

 Aman had been familiar with Microsoft Unity and introduced the rest of us to the software.  We spent a few hours familiarizing ourselves with Unity, C#, and creating UI designs.  Eric designed the code that analyzed and stored the data which we stored in a CSV file created by Michael.  Sam conceptualized the UI and Aman implemented it in Unity.  After that we tried in Eric's code to link the data with the application and populate our various fields.

CHALLENGES WE RAN INTO

One of the primary challenges faced in this project was handling the backend data. The effort required to build the database, parse it into custom data structures, and populating the gui comprised the vast majority of our time and resources. Some problems were platform specific. The Hololens filesystem isn't directly accessible to the developer, so we had to jump through a number of hoops simply to get our database file onto the device and readable.

Another major issue was working with the UI. Currently the Beta version of Microsoft Hololens doesn't natively support UI interaction, so we had to hack the UI by adding colliders to all of the elements.

ACCOMPLISHMENTS THAT WE'RE PROUD OF

We're proud of our flexibility. Our code was structured to be upscaled. Through using data files and file reading techniques, we're able to upscale the department store to encompass all sorts of products.

We're proud of our optimization. The number one purpose of creating this application is to improve e-commerce user experience. By creating a simple and beautiful UI, we accomplished that goal. We even managed to heavily reduce lag in our project, making it more user friendly.

WHAT WE LEARNED

 The most stalling factor was our limited experience with the development tools. No one member was fluent in C#, Unity3D, and Visual Studio. This made the division of labor more natural, and ensured that everyone was learning another field in order to contribute to the project. 
 We would be remiss if we failed to mention that we inevitably gained valuable experience working sleep deprived and to a harsh deadline. We all became somewhat irritable at least once over the course of the night, but we kept it from negatively impacting our team performance.

WHAT'S NEXT

Ultimately, this app will depend on an online web store to supply

BUILT WITH

This application was built using Unity-3D and the Microsoft Hololens toolkit for Visual Studio.

Built With

• unity