SHOPPING WITH AUGMENTED REALITY

Abstract

Augmented Reality (AR) applications compatible with modern smartphones have become a recent trend. In the context of grocery shopping, the effectiveness of mobile AR technology to keep track of the customer’s shopping history, total estimated bill amount, personal recommendations, and special offers for items while shopping. Supermarket retailers may inform regarding the special deals and discounts applicable to their loyal customers and hence attract more customers. In particular, more fascinating features such as assisting consumers with special needs such as health concerns can be integrated to AR systems. For example, the sugar, fat, and salt amount of the collected food items can be estimated and warned if exceeding the maximum threshold. To achieve the above requirements, an AR-enabled grocery shopping mobile application has been implemented. This application mainly focuses on three (3) scenarios; Product identification, displaying product details using pop-up windows and generating health advices using color tags considering the sugar, fat and salt levels of individual items as well as the total accumulated so far. For that, the user’s diet plan is also referred. ARToolKit and similar approaches were employed to implement and evaluate application comparing installation time and object detection distance range. Therefore, this Shopping with the AR innovative application will be a smart solution for Sri Lankan supermarket customers.