Retail Direct

Shopping can be stressful, difficult, and extremely time-consuming. Retail Direct effortlessly guides shoppers directly to their desired items.

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Inspiration

Hello, campers! It’s time to shop for your next camping trip. Chain stores are often so crowded with products that consumers have trouble navigating their aisles to get what they want, successfully. We recognize that not all customers shop with ease. Many of whom end up walking up and down aisles until they’re able to find the right aisle and the right product. That’s a waste of time and energy. What if an app were to let the customers add products to a list, then direct them along a real-time location tracking map, notifying where in the aisle the product is?

What it does

We created Retail Direct, a navigation app that keeps accessibility in mind. Retail Direct helps customers simplify their shopping experience through active navigation.

Shopping for your camping trip is a lot to take. Due to access issues, some customers have trouble reading the aisle signs and navigating where each product is located in that aisle.

Retail Direct changes that barrier. The app makes it easy to navigate the store through a real-time location tracking map, where an arrow will direct the customer to the correct aisle via voice directions, then notifications through computer vision object detection once the customer can reach the location and hold up their phone camera.

Navigating store aisles for disabled customers is even harder. For example, those who are blind or have low vision may have a hard time finding their way to the correct aisle and location of the product because the signs are high up and the products are impossible to distinguish from one another. Dyslexic customers may run into trouble with reading the aisles or products. Autistic customers may have trouble processing a lot of information at once and would benefit from a clear step-by-step route. Stores can hire assistants to support their customers, however, this is expensive to fund staffing.

How we built it

We utilized Microsoft Azure and Velo by Wix to develop a model mobile app. The computer vision aspect of the app was written using Python. The Wix site implements javascript and HTML. Our demo app shows the floor plan of a real CVS. We believe our design can be implemented in any organized retail location through the use of A* search which allows for each product to be created as a node in a graph. By using this search algorithm we can weigh each edge between nodes to simulate shelves in a store

Challenges we ran into

We found it challenging to access information from the mobile camera from our app, and then add audio information on top of it to assist people who cannot see the video. We learned how to embed the camera into our app to allow for audio overlay and access to the user's video of their surroundings.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We developed a mobile app that will aid shoppers using search algorithms, computer vision, and an intuitive mobile app. We are proud of these implementations in addition to the ways Retail Direct will make shopping easier for those who run into access issues at the store.

What we learned

We learned how to use Velo by Wix to create an interactive mobile app. We had to learn how to correctly implement multiple pages with pages for a shopping cart and navigational map. We learned about efficient searching algorithms, specifically A* and Dijkstra algorithms for path finding between nodes that simulate products on the map. We learned Microsoft Azure computer vision in order to create product recognition code that can detect food from a live video feed. Using Microsoft's computer vision client we not only detected food from a live video feed but then relayed that information through audio for users who would benefit from receiving visual information through audio.

What's next for Retail Direct

Retail Direct’s future is to connect the platform to ratings and reviews, preview competitors, and offer recipes for customers. 76% of consumers interact with their products before they arrive at the store. We hope for our platform to allow users to connect with the products before they arrive at the store to influence a higher purchasing rate through influenced recommendations for what to buy next. Retail Direct plans to work with the disabled community to advance computer vision and image-to-speech for easier navigation around the store.

We hope to expand our vision to other retail chains as well as improve the performance of Retail Direct with CVS.

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