Made use of the Design Sprint Method in order to come up with a product prototype - in this case, an Augmented Reality Food Ordering App.
GourmetAR is an end-to-end mobile food ordering company that provides augmented reality visualization for restaurant dishes and other food products, as well as support for ordering the dishes directly from your mobile phone.
“At GourmetAR, we’re all about augmenting the customer’s experience. By visualizing the dishes in augmented reality, the resulting experience is greatly enriched – moreover, combining this with an ordering system means the customer can conveniently place orders directly from their mobile phone. We aim to provide an AR Menu in your Pocket!”
GourmetAR has four main touchpoints with their potential customers and customers:
- Their mobile app
- Their website
- Via email
A user hears about GourmetAR via a friend or on social media and visits the GourmetAR website and/or downloads the app. Then the user searches for a restaurant or scans a physical QR code, browses an augmented reality menu, places the desired dish as a virtual object on a table in front of him or her, checks out and places their order. The order can be placed before arrival, or at the location.
An interactive prototype can be experienced here.
- Some of the challenges we have right now include differentiating ourselves from our competition. Our product and the value we offer is better than our competitors – mainly due to the use of the augmented reality technology, but the restaurants who we must close deals with may not understand that.
- One challenge we have is to make sure that scaling and maintaining up-to-date menus are as simple and low cost as possible. This could be achieved by providing an instruction manual on how to scan the objects and let the restaurants themselves create this source material. The tradeoff is that the scans would be of lower quality with respect to the work of a professional who uses very powerful cameras and very good lighting setups.
- The classic menu competition we have has been around for several years – can we really differentiate ourselves only though the use of Augmented Reality dishes?
- We’re a new, emerging company, it’s also a bit difficult to position ourselves in the market. Our best customers are younger people with jobs and students – people who are interested in emerging technology. How can we retain them and get more of them to use our service ?
- Will the added value of using augmented reality be enough so that restaurants will agree to reasonable a license fee to use our app, such that we can become profitable?
- What are the best types of restaurants or fast-food chains, that have the greatest profit margins and would be the most willing to pay a recurrent license fee to our company? Are there any, in particular, that stand out? If not, is there any other benefit we can think of that will change their minds?
- Our current 3D scans are not of the highest quality – they need a little polishing. Is there a low-cost way of getting an artist to work with us on polishing these models, so that the end result will make the user say “Wow!”?
- Can we perhaps also use this technology for restaurants or fast-food chains that want to advertise their new products? Will this bring an additional revenue stream?
- Can we convince competing restaurants and fast-food chains to upload their products to our platform? We can provide them with customizable template, that will only have their own products, but they may still not want to use a service, that will also allow customers to check out their competitor’s offers.
- Another challenge we have is how to attract a core user base and make them excited about our product, such that they share it on social media to create a snowballing effect.
- Since we are just starting out, how can we convince restaurants or fast-food chains that working with us is the best choice? Why would they not go to a competitor, such as KabaQ?
Some demo items were scanned using Photogrammetry, as a proof of concept. These scanned 3D objects could then be imported into a game engine easily and integrated into the AR app. The resulting 3D objects as well as examples of source images are available under the Photogrammetry folder.
Finally, a few test models were also uploaded to SketchFab.
Note: this project has been completed part of the Udacity Nanodegree Design Sprint Foundations. A certificate is available in the Certificate folder.