GroceryQuest

Inspiration

Our team is composed of three grad students in transition— first years, final years. We are a team of designers, women in engineering who are new to the XR space, but enthusiastic to learn.

We noticed that our friends and even ourselves were often uninspired by mundane but necessary tasks such as grocery shopping or doing dishes. After taking a design class, we thought about how we might change our perceptions of boring chores to exciting adventures.

The question we aimed to answer through our project was: How might we make mundane tasks like grocery shopping feel like less of a chore and more of an adventure for first-year grad students?

What it does

GroceryQuest currently demonstrates a sample shopping scenario. The scene opens with you in front of a grocery store. The Quest is pre-selected for the purposes of the demo, as is the Apple Pie recipe. Our future hope is that a user would select a specific Quest and Recipe to pursue in the GroceryQuest. For the purposes of the demo, the Quest is Pokémon Food Adventure and the Recipe is an Apple (Applin) Pie.

You start off viewing the Recipe/Grocery List and budget on the left and Professor Oak (a Pokemon-themed NPC) in the center. Your mission is written in words: to get the ingredients for an Applin Pie. The background is a grocery store, which we generated with the Figma Beta feature.

You can see the rest of the store and there are some interactions. Among the bales of apples which you can pick up, there lies an Applin Pokemon. Our future hope is that checking the Apple of the list generates an auditory explanation, further immersing you in the GroceryQuest as you go shopping. You can do the same with other items such as the Eggs and Eggsecute and the Butter and Butterfree with our predefined interactions.

Overall, GroceryQuest in its current form represents a prototype designed to get a feel of how a GroceryQuest might transform shopping from a mundane task to an exciting adventure with the potential to expand where XR goes and the realms of user customization.

How we built it

We built GroceryQuest through ShapesXR. As designers new to the XR space, there was a lot to learn. The first day we were a part of the workshops, but were intimidated by the vast amounts of code and C#. As designers new to the space but excited to delve into the world of XR, ShapesXR was a great option to prototype, to learn, and get a good feel for the space, easing into it. After getting ShapesXR to work and sync correctly, we watched several tutorials and started to experiment with development, including importing aspects and the Beta Figma integration. We made several Figma wireframes after storyboarding and uploaded them into ShapesXR. Finally, we synthesized all of our designs and constructed our GroceryQuest world in ShapesXR.

Challenges we ran into

Set up was quite the hassle, in addition to orienting ourselves to the XR space. As designers and students of human-computer interaction, we’ve been taught about prototyping methodologies. We were working with an old Quest 1, which required a million software updates. After finishing set up, ShapesXR was extremely helpful in re-orienting us and helping to bring our project to a higher fidelity than a mere idea or fiction.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We’re proud of what we were able to learn in the time given, going from 0 -> 0.5 and expanding our understanding of XR design and development during the span of the hackathon. We appreciate getting to learn more about XR development through the Hackathon.

What we learned

We learned how to use ShapesXR for the first time to prototype experiences in VR/AR! We also learned about the power of teamwork and friendship <3 This was all of our first hackathon in an area we knew nothing about!

What's next for GroceryQuest

We are excited to continue iterating on GroceryQuest and conquer new frontiers of XR. We aim to further develop personalization, activation, collaboration, and generative AI storytelling.

Personalization We will transform everyday shopping experiences into immersive and personalized adventures by offering the ability to select different quest options. Activation We will capture new XR users by expanding everyday use cases of XR to grocery shopping, dishes, and other everyday chores. Collaboration We will expand collaborations between XR companies, commercial partners like grocery stores, and XR users. Generative AI Storytelling We will open up room for diverse, unique, creative stories that inspire the imagination through personalization and AI-generation.

We envision a future where XR tools like GroceryQuest will spice up mundane and everyday tasks, inspiring new collaborations, stories, and ideas within the XR space for grad students and beyond.

Assets used: Apple Butter Pokeball Egg Figma pictures from the web

Built With

• figma
• shapesxr