Academic Spotlight: VR Supermarket- a Virtual Reality Online Shopping Platform with a Dynamic Recommendation System
HPCC Systems has a robust Academic Program that collaborates with colleges, universities, high schools and institutions of higher learning around the world.
One such collaboration with the Rashtreeya Vidyalaya College of Engineering (RVCE) in Bengaluru, India, has resulted in a new publication:
VR Supermarket: a Virtual Reality Online Shopping Platform with a Dynamic Recommendation System, published by IEEE Xplore®
Below is the paper abstract:
In this paper, VR Supermarket, a Virtual Reality (VR) online shopping platform is proposed to provide an immersive shopping experience for users. The system consists of four components – the VR application, front-end interfaces, the external databases and the recommendation system. The front-end interfaces handle the user input in a 360° rendered showroom where users can explore and buy products. Structured Query Languages (SQL) and Not only SQL (NoSQL) databases are integrated with the application to store inventory, customer information and billing information. An integrated recommendation system provides users a personalized shopping experience by recommending relevant products. The recommendations are based on the purchase history, which makes the VR supermarket a dynamic, adaptive and user-oriented system. The paper proposes a Neural Collaborative Filtering (NCF) recommendation system augmented by Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) and Attention layers. The VR supermarket provides a realistic user-friendly shopping experience where users are able to select from a variety of products and place orders. Seamless integration with databases enables extensive storage of supermarket data and the potential to scale up the application into an enterprise-level application that will add a new dimension to the statement “Shop at home.”
Technical poster and presentation
The lead student author of this article, Deeksha Shravani, is studying for a Bachelor of Computer Science and Engineering at the RV College of Engineering where she is researching Virtual Reality (VR) and the utilization of Big Data platforms for large scale computing. HPCC Systems provides this capability in addition to machine learning functionalities, making it a comprehensive platform for the development of integrated applications.
Deeksha was a recent participant in the Technical Poster competition at our annual HPCC Systems Community Day where she presented a poster entitled Developing a Recommendation System for a Virtual Reality based Supermarket using Big Data Platforms.
(Note: The poster can be viewed in a larger format on the Technical Poster competition wiki page.)
In Deeksha’s poster, she introduces a Virtual Reality (VR) based online shopping platform and its integration with a recommendation system with the demonstration of the virtual environment. With the advent of the pandemic, the ability of virtual reality platforms to provide a realistic shopping experience puts it in a unique position that assures safety and isolation while also offering the benefits of online shopping platforms to both customers and retailers.
For her poster project, Deeksha examined a dataset with 9M+ records, conducted a comparison of the training on a Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) utilizing HPCC Systems and Spark on Hadoop, and evaluated various metrics.
You can see Deeksha explain her technical poster presentation below to learn more about this topic, her methodologies, and her results including that Spark on Hadoop is faster in training while the results show HPCC Systems as the better platform for real time inferencing.
About the Authors:
Deeksha Shravani is studying for a Bachelor of Computer Science and Engineering at the RV College of Engineering, Bengaluru, India. Deeksha is currently researching Virtual Reality (VR) and the utilisation of Big Data platforms for large scale computing.
HPCC Systems provides this capability in addition to machine learning functionalities, making it a comprehensive platform for the development of integrated applications. Her interests include computer science, machine learning, cloud technologies and their applications.
Prajwal Y R is a student at RV College of Engineering pursuing Bachelor of Engineering in Computer Science. He is currently working on Virtual Reality (VR) supermarket and recommender systems.
His primary research interests include deep learning and natural language processing.
Prajwal V Atreyas is studying for a Bachelor of Computer Science and Engineering at the RV College of Engineering, Bengaluru, India.
Prajwal is currently researching Virtual Reality (VR) and Machine Learning (ML). His interests include computer science, big data analytics and deep learning.
Dr. G. Shobha is a Professor in the Computer Science and Engineering Department at the RV College of Engineering with teaching experience of 25 years. Her specialization includes Data mining, Machine Learning and Image processing. She has published more than 150 papers in reputed journals / conferences. She has also executed sponsored projects worth INR 200 lakhs funded from various agencies nationally and internationally. She is a recipient of various awards such as Career Award for young teachers 2007-08 constituted by All India Council of Technical Education, Best Researcher award from Cognizant 2017, GHC Faculty Scholar for Women in Computing in 2018, IBM Shared University Research Award in 2019, HPCC Systems community recognition award 2020. Dr Shobha was the recipient of the 2021 HPCC Systems Mentor Badge Award for providing guidance and direction towards the successful completion of intern open source projects.