ShareStore

Connecting those who need temporary storage space, and those who can provide it.

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Inspiration

Every 4 months, many students at the University of Waterloo have to reevaluate everything they own. Going away on coop can be extremely difficult, and what makes it even more disheartening alongside leaving your friends and family, is having to get rid of belongings that you can't take with you. Nothing makes a student feel not at home like not being able to buy something they love, just because they would have to get rid of it afterwards. Storage facilities can also become very expensive, very fast. With ShareStore, we immensely reduce this stress, making it easier, more convenient, and cheaper to leave behind and store your belongings. No need to feel like you can't have that chair, TV, fish tank, or even that succulent plant (yes! A plant!) that you love anymore!

What it does

ShareStore connects students/people with belongings that need to be stored with those who have plenty of room to store them! We provide a cheap, alternative method of storing your stuff, all while allowing the people with the storage space to make some valuable passive income. An added bonus is connecting those who have to leave their plants behind, and those who are willing to take care of them. This means that the user won't have their plant destroyed, and that the seller will get to have more plants around all while getting paid!

How I built it

We built ShareStore as an iOS app using Swift. We integrated the ARKit to determine how much space a storage seller has available. We also used Standard Library to host and create our API to contact end users when payments have been processed. We leveraged Google's Firebase for user authentication and our database. We also have a robust pipeline of detecting and classifying suitcases and storages as a reference for our ARKit to estimate the size and dimension of storage to store. We build the pipeline with Caffe 2 in python based on the recent and popular neural network Mask R-CNN. It not only output the bounding box of the objects, but it also used segmentation to provide a better accuracy estimation for ARKit.

Challenges we ran into

  • Inputting the amount of storage manually when creating a storage posting would be difficult, and might just be unintuitive enough to stop people from using our app. We realized we could leverage AR to deal with this challenge, making it extremely intuitive for people to share how much storage they have.

  • Initially, the frontend was made solely in React Native, but integrating the ARKit with the rest of the react-native frontend proved more difficult than expected. This meant that ShareStore had to be migrated into Swift in order to leverage the ease of use that AR provided the users.

  • Safety was an issue, but we came up with three ways to deal with that:

  • Having a rating system for the sellers meant that any issues would be dealt with

  • A verification process allows us to have more control over the seller, all while making them stand out and gain more customers.

  • Eventually, we want to have our own box-lending facilities, where for an additional charge, we provide the users with a tamper-proof lock and a box of appropriate size. This system is not in place yet.

Accomplishments that we are proud of

We were able to stick to our idea despite the difficulties we faced. We gave up on sleep, the chance of meeting some amazing people, and the amazing workshops, just to make sure that we finished what we had started. On a more technical note, the AR functionality that we created is very intuitive and accurate. We created a visual grid, allowing the seller to see exactly which areas could be used, and how large those areas are.

What we learned

We all learned tons about the intricate details of JavaScript and React Native, and their pros and cons. Making a UI proved to be easier with React in comparison to Swift, yet there were still a lot of times that we wished to have started the whole project on Swift. We learned just how powerful AR can be, and how it isn't just a gimmick to be forgotten about. We also learned how much the mentors and people in the industry would rather see a well-executed product with a good idea behind it, rather than a buzz-word filled project without anything of substance beyond all the jargon.

What's next for ShareStore

We loved working on ShareStore! And everyone loved the idea too! There is a need for this product, and we want to keep working on it. The first step would be to create a more intuitive and user-friendly UI while adding all the tiny features that we simply didn't have time to work on. The second step is to go to the Velocity incubator at the University of Waterloo and pinpoint our business model. ShareStore is a very exciting project, and we envision a great future for it.

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