Research

There are a wide variety of VR and AR technologies being developed as of recently. Products such as the Oculus’ Rift and Microsoft’s HoloLens provide a benchmark for top of the range experiences but also come at a pretty high consumer price (between £500-£3000 [1] which heavily limits the consumer base, which needs to be taken into consideration.

The project at hand is most likely to be targeted at high income clients known as EIPs (extremely important persons) which makes VR and AR experience a perfect match for the user base.

Current technologies involving VR and AR are heavily game oriented at the present, which may be changing thanks to the accessibility of powerful new devices becoming more readily available to developers and users [2]. This year alone has seen the rise of YouTube’s 360 video channel, the VR “movie” Allumette which was highly rated online [3], Verizon’s AOL purchase start-up RYOT bring VR news to its Huffington Post property [4], and many more such developments. It is clear that there is becoming a clear convergence of AR and VR content beyond entertainment, which is our aim.

VR and AR are also presently leading technologies for sports training methods, by providing a tactile experience for players to practice in, even without their usual equipment and/or the required space to usually perform said activity. Professional baseball players for the Dallas Cowboys have been known to use a VR headset to practice their plays and scrimmages, such that the coach can accurately ensure they are making the correct checks and movements in a 360 view. [5]

This tactile experience is what we are striving for in our system, primarily focused around the user-shopper experience. This medium has been explored before by a company called VisualCommerce™, who make entire 3D product inventories accessible and configurable within real world environments. The aim of VisualCommerce™ is to empower shoppers with confidence and efficiency when visualizing high-consideration items. [6] 

The power of virtual reality in commerce is demonstrated well by eBay in what they are calling the first ever virtual department store. [7] In this application they employ a search mechanism called Sight Search so users can move quickly through the virtual store without the use of hand controllers. This allows users to select items by focussing their sight on them, making for a natural experience requiring only the VR headset.

Virtual reality is already being utilised by clothing brands such as Dior and Tommy Hilfiger to watch 360 degree runway shows and even to go behind-the-scenes with some of the models. Earlier this year AT&T also partnered with Samsung to send shoppers at 133 different stores in the US on a virtual Carnival Cruise [8].

Lowe's, Ikea and Wayfair and other retailers have developed systems that allow their products to be seen in virtual reality, thus giving consumers a better idea of how the products will fit into their home, or to allow the consumer to get a better look at the product from home [9]. By using virtual reality consumers can turn the product around and see every side of it. This enables customers to get a better sense of how a product looks and about its features, than with the typical single picture used in traditional paper catalogues. The retail travel industry have been adopting virtual reality to enable customer in their stores to view cruise cabins, tourism content, and hotel rooms prior to booking [10].

In 2013, Ikea launched their augmented reality catalogue that allows shoppers to visualise how various pieces of furniture would look inside their home. TopShop also experimented with virtual reality further at London fashion week 2014. American apparel brought the online shopping experience to stores with their augmented reality app [11]. Customers were able to scan an item and see its reviews, the variety of colors in which it is available and they also had the ability to purchase it online.

Another virtual reality app was created by the shoe brand Converse; this allows customers to virtually try any pair of shoes that is available in their digital catalogue [12]. The British company Magic Mirror joined other retailers in order to provide to their customers a try-on virtual wardrobe technology [13]. Working with New Look, River Island and Jacques Vert, shoppers are able to virtually try-on a multitude of outfits in minutes with the added capability of sharing their outfit ideas on social media.

The two devices are similar in that they are Virtual Reality lenses that you attach to the user’s head. However, we chose to use the Microsoft HoloLens over the Oculus Rift as one of the main differences is that the Oculus Rift “is intended for seated experiences at the moment” [14]. This is not the case with HoloLens, however. Conversely, the HoloLens supports walking around with the headset on because you can actually see the real world as well as the virtual space. This feature is crucial for possible Net-a-Porter customers who might want to walk around products to view them properly before buying.

Furthermore, in contrast to the Oculus Rift, which needs to be plugged into a PC to work, the HoloLens “will be a self- contained computer” [14]. The HoloLens also provides us with some similarities to the Oculus Rift as it supports stereoscopic 3D and has speakers that provide directional audio (audio that is coming from a particular point in real space). Other HoloLens features include an integrated depth sensor, finger-swiping gesture support which is very useful for our app, and a built-in mic for voice commands which is useful if our project is merged with the other two Net-a-porter projects to support a chat-bot. [15]

When looking into which device would best suit our project we found a very useful tutorial offered by Microsoft (Holograms 101E) which is a comprehensive and straightforward tutorial on how to program all the features we need for the app we are developing. A further benefit of this tutorial is that it is carried out in Unity a development environment we were planning on using and which we are familiar with [16].

University College London has made the Microsoft HoloLens available to us as a tool to showcase our app in. Initial research on this device (seen above) reveals that it is very accessible because of the availability of tutorials to understand the device [14] so this is the device we will be using.

Unity3D is a free development platform primarily for gaming but over the years it has adapted to support VR project development [18]. Unity has an extensive documentation on how to get started building VR projects and also several tutorials available for free [19]. The advantage of using Unity is that we can use familiar programming languages (either C# or UnityScript, the latter based on JavaScript) to create the scripts for the application [20]. The user friendly interface will make it easier to develop this app. Because of these reasons Unity seems like the ideal development tool to use for this project.

Furthermore, since we are looking to develop an application for the Microsoft HoloLens, Unity seems like the appropriate choice because Microsoft and Unity have partnered together [21] which facilitates our development.

Testing and building of our app can be done on a local development machine with Unity using Microsoft’s HoloLens Emulator. The machine has a set of prerequisites [22] that can be easily met, which means we do not need much access to the actual HoloLens for day to day testing and development. This is an advantage because our dependencies on third parties are reduced.

All of us are familiar with both programming languages available in Unity [20], but we will develop on C# since the other Net-a-porter teams are using it too and we must think about compatibility if we want to combine the three product in the future. Safe code publishing is ensured too because C# is strictly typed.

This model is one in which each phase of a product’s life cycle takes place in sequence, so that progress flows steadily downwards through these phases like a waterfall. In waterfall methodologies the developers need to gather all the requirements and do the before any coding takes place.

The biggest advantage is that potential issues that would have been found during development can be researched and bottomed out during the design phase. Also the development process tends to be better documented.

The main disadvantage and reason for not using this development technique in our project is that this type of development does not work well in the case that the client does not exactly know what they want upfront and what is possible with the technology available. Changes to the requirements cannot be easily incorporated with the waterfall method [24].

An Agile software development methodology, such as Scrum, is one which prefers an incremental, iterative approach over a linear one.

Instead of extensive planning and design up front, Agile methodologies allow for changing requirements over time by using cross-functional teams which work on successive iterations of the product over fixed time periods. The goal of each iteration is to produce a working product, which can be demonstrated to stakeholders [24].

Some of the advantages of using an Agile methodology in our project development are:

• Working software is delivered quickly and successive iterations can be delivered frequently.
• There is a closer collaboration between developers and the business.
• Changes to the requirements can be incorporated at any point of the process.

The main disadvantage is that Agile methodologies are often more difficult to understand that  linear, sequential ones - at least initially.

Extreme Programming (XP) is one of the most popular and controversial agile methodologies. XP is a disciplined approach to delivering high-quality software quickly and  continuously. It promotes high customer involvement, rapid feedback loops, continuous testing and planning, and close teamwork to deliver working software at very frequent intervals (1-3 weeks) [25].

Some of the advantages of extreme programming are cost reduction, better risk management, robustness, resilience and better overall satisfaction. The biggest disadvantage of XP is that it assumes the constant involvement of the customer. Its success depends on data collection at many stages of the development process. Many customers might not be available, and many others might dislike such constant involvement .

As a team we have decided to use Scrum for developing the application. This is because our client and us both prefer using an Agile approach to system engineering, mainly because we can communicate frequently with our client and they value communication very highly. Within the two Agile methodologies explored, as a team we have more experience using Scrum and supporting software so we have decided on Scrum.