In Its Place

Inspiration

In Its Place is a cross platform XR shopping experience.

Shop from the comfort of your own home and find the perfect fit for household goods (e.g. art, furniture, plants, etc.). We aimed to mimic a brick and mortar shopping experience at home. You no longer have to question whether an item will look good in your home before you buy it. No more worrying about returns!

What it does

Provides retailers the advantage of showroom style spatial layout of their goods (rather than a flat website), with good flow through the retail experience.

Consumers have the benefit of trying out items in their home allowing them to select items that match their color scheme/décor and they can also test the fit (they can even test if they can maneuver it up stairs, pivot!). Users will feel like they’re walking around a store in real life, with the benefits of not leaving their homes.

How we built it

We used Unity and MRTK3. We used the Unity Probuilder tool to build a majority of the assets.

Challenges we ran into

We wanted the application to work on both the HoloLens and the Quest 2. And, we wanted the experiences to be similar on both devices. We accomplished this with MRTK2; however, this was not possible on MRTK3 at this time.

MRTK3 does not support hand tracking on the Quest 2. This required us to add controller support for the Quest 2. Also, passthrough on Quest2 is only supported via the Oculus XR plugin; therefore, we had to toggle between plugins and camera providers (Open XR and Oculus) to achieve the cross-platform support. Finally, Quest 2 does not currently support spatial mapping, so this limited our design choices.

Finally, we originally targeted the Unity Universal Render Pipeline (URP) shaders; however, we found that they were not supported yet.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Achieving a cross platform experience that was similar despite not all features being available on each platform.

We created the majority of the assets ourselves.

We collaborated across 3 time zones (EST -5, IST +5.5, NZST +12)

What we learned

Documentation is incredibly important. For example, we did not read the “known issues” section of the documentation until later in the project. This section confirmed that hand tracking was not supported on Quest 2 which would have saved us a lot time.

In addition, we had trouble creating a base project. The Zappys demo was very helpful and we appreciate detailed examples like this.

On the HoloLens, the UI is significantly improved in MRTK3. Most other elements we worked with felt incomplete compared with 2.7.3 which we have used extensively. Particularly around Spatial mapping.

What's next for In Its Place

We plan on expanding to more shopping experiences (e.g. furniture, etc.). In addition, we’re excited about eventually enabling hand tracking on the Quest 2.