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Virtual Reality Market in India

Sparsh Gera 1 Stories

Thursday June 16, 2016 , 6 min Read

Virtual reality is the new buzz that everyone is witnessing in the Technology space. Today we will try to take you through the Indian VR market, what’s happening on the ground and who are the key players to watch out for in Indian VR space

VR is a technology and technology is always global, there is no geographic boundaries in terms of use and application. Then why are we talking about the Indian subcontinent here with respect to a specific technology?

The answer actually lies in terms of the speed of adoption of technology and the huge numbers of potential users (keeping in mind the total population and large base of ever expanding smartphones users). By any means it is going to be the biggest potential as far as business is concerned.

So who are the first movers in India? What are the challenges they are taking on?

MerakiVR (Content)— Meraki Tops our list of VR companies in India because of their close association, some cool work and big projects in the most hyped sport of India — CRICKET.

Meraki is one of India’s first VR content production studios for consumers as well as businesses. They create 360-degree videos and films for events, tourism, sports, adventure, advertisements, experiential marketing, real estate, weddings, news and fiction. The company’s expertise lies in ideating and producing VR content from end to end so that people can consume content in complete immersion.

Meraki’s biggest project is the Asia Cup, which was held in February. The matches are yet to go live. They covered the in-stadium experiences of matches between India and Bangladesh and India and Pakistan at Mirpur, Dhaka. The India vs Bangladesh match that they captured was the world’s first cricket match in VR. This is something really cool that every passionate cricket Fan will look forward to and will definitely trigger the huge VR device sale that everyone is waiting for.

2. Absentia (Device) — After raising their first round of funding of Rs. 1.2 crore from Astarc Ventures, 50k Ventures, and other individual angel investors like Vish Satthapan, Sameer Sainani Rajeev Krishnan, Abhishek Jain, and Nagaraj Magadum. The undergrads from BITS Pilani — Goa are eyeing to beat Oculus in India.

Tesseract — the virtual reality headgear created by absentia team ets users play any 2D game (or watch any movie) in 3D with complete 360-degree head tracking. What differentiates this from its other competitors like Oculus is that it is compatible with all existing PC games, movies and can also live stream from online gaming communities. It can also be used with mobile phones through devices like Chromecast.

Beating Oculus may seems to be dream to big to achieve practically but nevertheless we appreciate the vision and goals they have set for themselves and hence we give them the second spot in our list.

3. Imaginate (Products and Services)- Third on our list, Imaginate, a VR company incubated at the International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad and founded 4 years ago by Hemant Satyanarayana, has launched a serious of innovative applications for VR hardware:

Dressy, a virtual online fitting room where from the comfort of your home you can try out a variety of dresses and sizes before ordering them online.

ShootAR, a simulator for the Indian Army to train soldiers in marksmanship and tackling terrorists

HeritageAR, an initiative adopted by the Aga Khan Foundation and available as an app at the Google Play Store where one can virtually tour the Quli Qutb Shahi Tombs

The company made at hit at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this year with its latest VR product, the Connected Car virtual tour.

A great feedback from Tech Guru Rajiv Makhani during MWC’16 and dedication towards the field of AR and VR has landed the company on third spot in the list.

4. Zebronics ZebVR (Device) — Bringing in an immersive experience tracked in a three-dimensional world, ZEB-VR Headsets looks like something from a science fiction movie. Its comes in dark black color with blue rims. Look behind it and you’ll find: thick memory foam padding for extra comfort while you play games and watch movies for an extended period. Also a pair of lenses with interpupillary distance and focus adjustment based on the phone display size and the users eye focus comfort. And of course the straps (elastic harness) that hold it all in place with. ZEB-VR comes with magnet toggle switch, the ring is made of rare earth metal neodymium and the disc is made of ceramic. This switch enables you to interact with the mobile phone VR application

With impressive price range of 1600INR there is nothing much in terms of features except the magnet toggle switch. We would term it just as a rebranded Chinese product, having said that we will still keep it at the 4th spot because it has already created a market for itself among the masses and once the virtual reality (VR) phenomenon explodes in India, the huge base of smartphone users will look forward to a cheap product to try out the technology and ZebVR exactly provide that with trust of an average brand behind it.

5. Look Mobility (Platform for building VR apps and experience) — Look Mobility is working on creating Do-It-Yourself platform for builders and architects who has floor plans and models can create a virtual tour using our platform without any programming knowledge. For the end user, they have look Studio app, from where user can design and visualize their home interior themselves and also buy home furnishing products. Apart from this, they have solution for the content consuming part of the platform, where they have created world’s first flat foldable VR headsets called foloVR.

Although as of now we are keeping Look Mobility at 5th place because the product is still not completely build but do keep an eye on them as they are moving very fast and we would say they are definitely ahead of time and are betting big on bridging the content gap in VR space.

There are still many companies left that we have not added to this list because we wanted to choose top 5 only or else this article would become very long. We are adding those amazing startups below and will soon come with another article for them.

Content

1. SmartVizX — Content creation for brands

2. SpectraVR — Content creation for brands

3. GreyKernel — VR apps for mobile

4. VWision — VR solutions end to end

5. Xenium — VR, AR, simulation and experiential marketing solutions for brands

6. Hash Media –Apps for AR and VR, Device (Virtual Mirror) person can see himself in clothes without wearing them

7. Yantram Studio — VR apps and walkthrough

8. Ingage

Device

1. Aura VR

2. Agnus VR