Shoeager:
an immersive VR shoe design studio that enhances the real-world shoe DIY experience in virtual reality.
Project Proposal
Problem Description
Shoe DIY is fun and playful, adding personality to a person's styling. You probably have seen a viral video where someone DIYs a pair of Air Jordan white with anime figures or cool graphics. However, not everyone can afford the cost of DIY shoes. There are material costs of purchasing shoes, art supplies, and crafting tools. The DIY part is skill demanding to do an excellent job painting over the shoes or customize the shoe's materials and shape.
Motivation of using VR
We can bring shoe DIY into virtual reality to make the DIY experience more accessible to the public. The immersive experience of DIY shoes in VR mimics the DIY shoes in the real world and improves the experience. In the virtual world, people can explore endless DIY possibilities with various models of shoes, unlimited art supplies, and tools without worrying about the cost. Virtual guides and friendly user interfaces can help people make their shoe designs come true without struggling with crafting or painting skills.
Existing applications
While there isn't a dedicated shoe DIY VR application on the market, we can look at existing applications that involve fashion and DIY. VRChat is a popular social application that allows users to dress up in avatars and interact with others in virtual worlds. VRChat allows users to create their avatars and dress them in virtual worlds. People can try shoes with options to change shoe designs. However, the DIY part of the experience needs to be better supported. Most clothing customization in VRChat is set up during the development process rather than inside the game. It is considerably limited to in-game DIY experiences.
At the other end of the spectrum, Google's Tilt Brush allows users to design anything with 3D drawings inside the virtual world freely. Title Brush has a variety of tools and painting configurations that allows the user to create different textures and colors. People used it to prototype new Adidas sneakers. However, Title Brush doesn't come with any pre-made shoe models. It demands strong art skills to use. And the 3D drawings are not interactive.
Proposed solution
After evaluating the existing applications, we wanted a VR application that allows users to DIY shoes and tries on the shoes. We propose to build a virtual shoe studio Shoeager where people explore shoe DIY in a dedicated shoe crafting shop. Users can select a shoe they want to DIY from pre-made shoe models. The shoe models are interactive; users can pick them up, move them around, or hold them at different angles. There are art supplies such as paint brushes and pens, and users can use them to paint overshoes, just like in the real world. After the user finishes their design, the user can try on the shoes and inspect them in the mirror.
To deliver a full immersion of the VR experience, we will use head mounted display (HMD). We will build our application with Unity and deploy it on the Oculus Quest 2. We will utilize Oculus Quest 2 inside-out tracking to support physical locomotion and head tracking with six degrees of freedom. We will use controller tracking to capture user interaction and hand positions accurately and responsively. Besides locomotion and grasping, we will enable ray-casting interaction for 2D user interfaces such as the setting menus. The goal here is to allow the user to freely DIY shoes in the virtual world, just like in the real world, and improve the user experience with a friendly UI design that guides the user using our application. More details about the application design in the prototype section.
Team Members
& Contribution
Annie Qiu
Shoe setting; User Restriction; Poster; First demo Integration; RIT Frameless Presentation
Weijun Li
All tools functions (pens, sprayers, eraser); Tools scale; Shoes scale; First demo Integration; UI Interactions; RIT Frameless Presentation
Yao Liu
Poster, Website; Environment Setting; Menu; Trash Bin; RIT Frameless Presentation; Testing and User Evaluation
Yibo He
Video Demo, Shoe Models, Game Development, Evaluation Plan, Website, RIT Frameless Presentation
Boshen Yuan
Final Presentation, Table Model, Table Button