RARE Shop: Real & Augmented Retail Bookshop Experience using Projection Mapping

Augmented reality (AR) technology has been used to integrate online product information to the physical shopping experience by relying on hardware outputs such as head-mounted displays or mobile devices, which interferes with the customers natural in-store shopping experience. Different from traditional AR, spatial augmented reality (SAR) could potentially offer an unmediated augmented physical experience. In this paper, we present a proof-of-concept prototype that augments existing physical shops with online personalized product information without disrupting the customer's natural shopping behavior. We envision a real and augmented book shop experience, using SAR to provide immersive digital and online information overlaid onto physical products, breaking down the boundary between physical space and digital information at retail shops. Moreover, we design unmediated interaction that reacts to the relative spatial and temporal context of the users, based on user's natural interactions with the physical products, without the need for learning special interactions/gestures. We also discuss the design challenges and implications for this in-store shopping experience.