ARetail

Portal door with occlusion effect
Virtual shopping experience
Covid 19 safety gudielines

Inspiration

The current Covid-19 situation has put a hold on a lot of things that we assumed were normal. Going to a store and picking up clothes is one of them. Online shopping of apparels currently results to a whopping 40% of returns because the users do not get an actual perception of how a dress might look until its in their hands.

What it does

We bring the physical store to the user with the power of Augmented Reality. ARetail as we call it enables users to visualize the clothes they like with a store like an experience. This helps the users make a more confident choice to purchase and thus reducing returns.

How we built it

Spark AR Studio's documentation helped in getting around the interface and features very quickly. We designed a 3D Boutique on Sketchup, added proper materials in blender and bought into Spark AR Studio. Sample Template gave us a quick way to get the basics ready with respect to plane tracking, so we could get to quickly focusing on the storyboard and content placement in the scene. Logics were applied using the Patch Editor which seemed to be better and faster than having to code everything up in Javascript.

Challenges we ran into

The Size limitation set for 4MB for Instagram is painful one and we learned that the hard way. We had to strip down a lot of details from our 3D environment to bring the size and poly count down and then further reduce mesh resolution of mannequin and clothes using decimation in blender as well as simplygon.

The next major challenge is that the plane tracker feature isn't quite stable. There's a lot stability issues here especially on Android. iPhone seems to have a more stable tracking, but I believe SparkAR has a lot of work to do here and fix out the issues with respect to SLAM and maybe use native ARCore and ARKit apis fro ground plane detection and spatial awareness.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

What we learned

Learning a new tool is always challenging and fun, and Spark AR Studio was no different. We even fiddled around making funny facial effects with goofy glasses and realized how easy it is to get started but to perfect you need a lot of creative skill.

What's next for ARetail

We want to get a lot of reach for our AR project with Spark AR and show that social media is the true powerhouse in enabling the new normal even in retail businesses while also making e-commerce more efiecient. We will also work on more demos with SparkAR and maybe find a way to monetize it for our skills.