AR Shopping List : Exploring the Design Space of Smart Glasses to Allow Real-time Recording with Multiple Input Formats

Abstract: It is widely considered that in-store shopping is a repetitive yet vital activity in human life. People are accustomed to making shopping lists on a piece of paper or on their mobile phones, or more commonly, memorizing the list in their minds. However, people tend to forget the items they want to buy if they cannot write them down immediately when they have the shopping demand, let alone keeping the list in their minds. Some work has started to help people resolve this problem, yet most of them are based on smartphones and are focused on riching add-on functions of the shopping list applications instead of allowing real-time recording. Namely, these existing shopping-list systems cannot let people record items and satisfy their information needs while minimizing the intervention to their ongoing activities. In this study, a new Augmented Reality (AR) solution named AR Shopping List was proposed. It is a smart-glasses application that allows users to add items at any time and place and with arbitrary input formats (photos, videos, and voice to text). We conducted semi-structured interviews with twelve participants aged from 20 to 30 by letting them experience the AR Shopping List app themselves on Microsoft HoloLens (1st gen). Our interviews reveal that the AR Shopping List realizes real-time recording, and therefore releases people’s hands from touching a physical device when making a list. It also shows the app’s potential in helping people reduce the opportunity of forgetting something to buy, as well as shopping more targeted. Furthermore, this research sheds light on future designs on smart-glasses applications for assisting people in recording and remembering items, building a new memorizing habit, and further functioning as people’s working memory expansion.