Mobile Application for Augmented Shopping: Virtual Shoe Try-on and Virtual Equipment Placement

The shopping experience has recently witnessed drastic changes with the ubiquity of online shopping, especially with the introduction of shopping through smartphones. The accessibility of these devices and their expanding functionalities have made them more popular in providing a full shopping experience. An obvious issue with common homeshopping applications is that customers cannot try the clothing items themselves. Also, when purchasing furniture or equipment that takes a significant amount of space, it is impossible to know if the item suits the room until it is already bought and delivered. Augmented reality can help customers to test whether the product matches what they are looking for. In this paper, we propose an augmented reality solution to enhance the online shopping experience. The proposed tool views the 3D equipment model using AR and sees if it fits in the identified space through the camera in the room. Also, users can try shoes through the cameras of their phones. Finally, a shoe size recommendation system is developed using a machine learning algorithm that detects the foot and returns the recommended shoe size. The application was evaluated on 10 users. The results show the effectiveness and efficiency of the developed solution. A set of four tasks are utilized to evaluate the solution in terms of the System Usability Scale (SUS) and task completion time. The research outcome can be used to help in developing a better user experience for a wider range of AR shopping applications.