Sharie

Inspiration

Having seen the innate desire of people just go out and interact with each other, we sought to find a way to sway people from doing that (health comes first!). So, we came up with an idea to make people interact with each other as they would offline, but online, while doing their beloved weekly habit: shopping. For the people, the solution plays two important rules: (1) it acts as a more firm hook that pulls people towards not going outside to find their desired goods and (2) it provides an enjoyable approximate experience of what they get when shopping offline. This will not only result in a better quarantined, more healthy population, but one that is happy with the experience they have from their homes.

What it does

What we propose is an immersive middle man between buyers and sellers. Its immersivity comes from its game-like structure: every experience found while shopping offline is replicated and brought into a virtual reality platform viewable using VR Headsets or simply a web browser. Products are displayed to the buyers as they would be in real life⁠—canned food on shelves, soda cans in refrigerators, and clothes on mannequins. What the buyer has to do is select (after inspection of the generated 3D model and its Info Card) the products he or she likes to buy, go to the cashier to pay or select cash-on-delivery, and wait for the product to arrive at his or her doorsteps. (To fully immerse the user, chatting with other customers is allowed. Moreover, local shops close to the user are aligned on a virtual street where users can hop from one shop to another seamlessly.) A notification of the bought products is then sent to the shop owner. The shop owner processes it, preparing the good if needed, and then assigns a (trained) delivery person to deliver the product.

What's next for Sharie

The next step will be the implementation of the project in most of the prominent local shops in the world to include the products of each country in the world.