ARSE

Purpose

ARSE is an AR ecommerce application built for Howard’s Applicances. This application is meant to navigate clients across Howard’s “experience center” stores to find products and more information about them. The AR aspect is meant to show more information about a specific product when the user hover’s over it using their phone. Meanwhile, it would be pretty pointless to create an application for a store without an ecommerce factor which is why we decided to include that as well.

Lore

My group was very fortunate to be in a position to develop an application for a legitimate company that had this idea. Currently my group was ironing out the details of the development enviornment and the technologies we need to use in order to finish this product. We concluded that we were going to at the time being develop this application for IOS only due to the positive developer experience and tools provided by Apple. One of those tools that we knew was going to be useful was ARkit which when researching has been used in many similar products.

During this research I allocated some time in order to construct a working prototype of how the application would look and act. I used the popular UI/UX tool Figma for this as a way to seemlessly demonstrate the prototype to the Howard’s representative. The final rendition of the application may look way different though considering that the IOS development platform might be a bit restraining in how the UI will look.

Challenges

Just like all good projects, time is not on our side unfortunately. We were expected to demonstrate a product around May, so it was a fun experience with the limited time we had. Another challenge that we have been bouncing around with are the technologies and where our focuses should land during the development process. There was a lot of back an forth between choosing what CMS softwares we should use and tiny little details that costed us significant time. In the end we had to cut a lot of ambitious fat when it came to this project idea. However I did manage to make a working SwiftUI interface and my team did get the Strapi backend and AR working.

Below are some screenshots of how the product looked in the end using Xcode’s simulator.