Virtual Shopping Experience

The initial virtual shopping experience was created by a group of talented undergraduates who participated in the 2010 SPIRE-EIT NSF Research Experiences for Undergraduates program held at Iowa State University. Further development and refinement was performed by both undergraduates and graduate students at Iowa State University. What you see here is a person in an immersive environment called METaL (http://www.vrac.iastate.edu/facilities/metal/) which consists of two rear projected screens and a projected floor. Stereo images combined with position tracking of the user's head and the shopping cart input device allow the user to move around within the store and view the items on the shelves. The shopping cart input device uses an optical linear encoder to record motions that are used to generate commands to move the scene forward and a 6DOF optical tracking system to generate commands to rotate the scene. A Wii mote is affixed to the cart to provide button input only. The task was to find 4 specific items in the store. Once the user found the item in the aisle, he/she pushes a button on the wii mote and the store item appears in the shopping basket. VRJuggLUA, an open source software library was used to build this application. If you'd like to learn more, here's a reference: Carlson, P., Kirpes, C., Pavlik, R. A., Vance, J. M., Yin, L., Scott-Cooper, T., and Lambert, T., 2011, “Comparison of a Single-wall Versus Multi-wall Virtual Environments to Support a Virtual Shopping Experience,” ASME World Conference on Innovative Virtual Reality, June 27-29, Milan, IT. DOI: 10.1115/WINVR2011-5582. A reference for VRJuggLUA is this: 23. Pavlik, R. A., and Vance, J. M., 2011, “VR JuggLua: A Framework for VR Applications Combining Lua, OpenSceneGraph, and VR Juggler,” Workshop on Software Engineering and Architectures for Realtime Interactive Systems (SEARIS), March 20, Singapore, pp. 29-35, DOI: 10.1109/SEARIS.2012.6231166. Full text versions of these papers can be found here: http://works.bepress.com/judy_vance