As it’s rightly said, “Dream big and Start Small”. That’s how our start-up’s story starts back in 2015. My business partner and the CEO of Infusory, Mr. Thomson Tom, one day saw a person watching something through a Google Cardboard at a pavilion in Start-up Village in Kochi, Kerala. Curious enough he wanted to try out what caught everyone’s attention and gathering there. He finally went and tried it out as well and was amazed by what he saw. This place provided him with a 360-degree view of the Taj Mahal without actually being in Agra. That was when the magic of Virtual Reality dawned upon him. He was then a student of B Tech in Mechanical engineering at St. Joseph’s College of Engineering and Technology, Palai. With further thoughts, dreams, and hopes he left the place to research more on the possibilities of the field and learned a lot about the development of VR[1] Apps and other potentials of this field.
Virtual Reality is the three-dimensional image or environment which is generated with the help of computers. VR requires a head mount device for experiencing it. This device tracks the movement of our head and in turn, it gets reflected in what is shown in the headset i.e. if we turn our head to the left, the content in the left of the virtual environment can be seen providing 360-degree viewing experience of 3D content. Users can also navigate through the virtual environment with the help of controllers.
Figure 1: Experiencing virtual reality
Getting back to the story, Thomson found himself venturing further into the field of VR and he formed a team with his friends who were interested in VR and provided them with the resources to study the same. With their help, he conducted a VR workshop in SCMS School of Engineering and Technology, Karukutty on 12th March 2016. It was one of the first VR workshops conducted at a college in Kerala. This marked the beginning of Infusory.
Figure 2 VR workshop conducted at SCMS
IEEE has played a crucial role in our start-up journey which paved the way to meet Thomson. We met during one of the IEEE events, connected, shared our ideas, and officially started Infusory at my college TBI[2] (Govt. Engineering College TBI). Initially, I started working as a hardware developer in Infusory since I was passionate about doing electronics-based projects from my college days. There is also a story behind how I started which you can read on my blog “My Project Stories”
Our first project at Infusory came in the form of UCom (Your Companion Stick). It was a simple pipe-like device with functionalities to fight against stray dog attacks with the help of spark and electric shock system. Even though our project caught media attention, it lacked a unique selling point in the market and it didn’t work as likely as we thought of it. So, we were compelled to abandon the project and focus on our educational services.
We continued taking sessions and workshops in colleges all over Kerala including premier institutes like IIT Bhubaneswar, NIT Calicut, etc.
Next came along the company registration of our start-up as a private limited company, we were finally able to provide AR[3]/VR content development services to industries.
Our first industrial project was for Singapore Airlines. We made a VR Airplane cleaning simulator through which their staff can be trained in interior cleaning of Boeing 737 aircraft. The whole simulator was developed in the Unity 3D game engine.
Through virtual reality, the industrial training system got revolutionized as there was no more a requirement for any physical materials or the environment for conducting the training. Only a VR headset is required and any environment can be simulated with the help of a computer. Thus, the whole training system got simplified and seemed just like a game.
We used the Unity 3D platform for the development of VR/AR applications. It’s a game engine used for the development of many famous games. The major advantage of Unity is the cross-platform support it offers. We can develop applications for Windows, Linux, Android, IOS, and many other platforms using Unity and it has its store (Unity Asset Store) for getting basic models and plugins required for the development. Since it is a game engine, we can develop basic functionalities using a drag and drop mechanism. But for developing more complex applications, we need to code C# in Visual Studio Code Editor integrated with Unity. We also need SDKs (Software Development Kits) for integrating VR or AR functionality. And Unity supports 3D models designed using most of the designing software such as Blender, Maya, Autodesk 3ds Max, etc.
We had our initial struggle days when we struggled to debug errors in the code. During the development, our whole team stayed in one place and worked day in and day out to solve the bugs. We learned many aspects of virtual reality by the end of that project.
After that, there came the campus election at Govt. Engineering College Thrissur. By rule plastic banners were banned for the election campaign. So, they used cloth banners instead of flex which limited the use of colourful pictures. This made us think that why can’t we use augmented reality (AR) for the promotion.
Augmented Reality is the technology through which 3D objects, images, or videos are placed in the real world. As the name says we are augmenting the real-world experience.
It was our CTO[4] Aadhil Khan who made an augmented reality android app using the Unity game engine and Vuforia (one of the SDKs used in AR).
When the app’s camera was pointed at the election posters installed by political parties, it showed photos and videos of candidates, campaigns conducted, etc.
It became a huge success. Augmented GEC got featured in newspapers and news channels. We even had calls from the Kerala Election Commission.
Figure 3. Article about Augmented GEC in The Hindu newspaper
The success of Augmented GEC, also led us to the Clap International School of Business wherein we were called to make an AR resume for them.
We augmented the resumes and brochure of CLAP international business school. CLAP AR app makes the student resumes come alive where their 3D holograms talk about their skills and abilities.
Thus followed other exciting projects. We had a client asking us regarding the AR promotion app for Malayalam science fiction movie ‘9’. Though extremely excited we were faced with lots of challenges as the client needed a demo app to assure the quality of our work. We got his call at 8PM asking for a demo. At the time, Aadhil, Thomson, and I were in 3 different parts of Kerala for our workshop purposes. But we coordinated the work over the phone and delivered the demo app within 4 hours and we got that project. It took us some sleepless nights to complete this project.
Figure 4. AR app developed for the ‘9’ movie promotion
Thus, we created one of the innovative movie promotion apps in Mollywood. The most interesting thing was checking the number of app downloads after uploading it to Google Play Store. It reached about 1000 downloads within one week.
After that, we made several augmented and virtual reality projects ranging from movie promotion for the Malayalam movie Lucifer (in which we got a chance to meet and work with legendary actor Sri. Mohanlal) to big screen AR show at Thrissur Shopping Festival. You can find more details about the development of these projects on our website.
There were times we felt dejected and lost our hope but we motivated one another, stayed positive, and completed each project successfully. We learned many things, realized our strengths and weaknesses, and sharpened our skillset after each of these projects. That’s how we moulded ourselves from mere students to professionals and are still growing with each project.
For the budding entrepreneurs who are wishing to Start-Up on their innovative ideas and views, here’s a piece from my experience.
If you wish to start your own venture, keep in mind that entrepreneurship is an emotional roller coaster. You may face many ups and downs from the starting of the journey but at the end the experience and exposure you get would be worth it all and priceless.
Start your venture, when you are in college itself so that you have a strong network of friends and organisations like IEEE to support you. You cannot get back those things once you pass out of college. Try as many things as possible and you end up finding your right passion. Always try and follow your passion and convert it into your profession.
1.Virtual Reality 2.Technology Business Incubator 3. Augmented Reality 4.Chief Technology Officer
Profile
Shyam Pradeep Alil
Mr. Shyam Pradeep Alil is the co-founder and the Chief Operations Officer of Infusory Future Tech Labs Pvt. Ltd. He graduated in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from Govt. Engineering College Thrissur in 2018. He is passionate about doing projects and has filed a patent for one of his projects “Portito”, a portable toilet that can be used while traveling in buses.
He is a young professional member of the IEEE Kerala session and also serves as the entrepreneurship working group coordinator of IEEE Kerala Young Professionals.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shyampradeep/
Blog: https://myprojectstories.com/
Website: https://infusory.in/
Email: shyam.pradeep.in@ieee.org
