Indian Innovators (2 page)

Anirudh’s achievement has earned him more than just money, for he has gained admission to a fully funded master’s degree program at MIT, and a chance to work with top researchers at the famed MIT Media Labs.

“I always felt that people from elite universities get special treatment and it is easier for them to attract attention. Thus, I feel MIT would give me what I missed due to (not clearing) the IIT entrance exam. It will be a great learning experience and networking opportunity. My partners at Ducere are committed to keep the work moving, despite my physical absence.”

Hemanth Satyanarayana

Augmented Reality-based Virtual Trial Rooms

Have you ever been frustrated by the long queue at the trial room of your apparel store? Or, do you find shopping online for clothes unreliable, because you cannot experience how the clothes would look on you?

Hemanth Satyanarayana has developed a solution for this – TrialAR or “Trial room using Augmented Reality”, a technology that lets you try clothes digitally, without having to wear them.

In 2012, at the age of 29, Hemanth was named among the top innovators in India by MIT Technology Review. Though he started working on TrialAR only in 2010, his tryst with augmented reality dates back to his days at the State University of New York. Augmented reality (AR) is a term used to describe a combination of physical and virtual reality, in which our real-world environment is enhanced by computer-generated content.

Hemanth graduated from IIT Madras in 2003 with a degree in Mechanical Engineering and worked with IBM in software development for about a year. He then went to the US to pursue a Master of Science (MS) degree at the State University of New York (SUNY), Buffalo.

“During my IIT days, I was far away from anything related to innovation,” Hemanth says. “I was very active in cultural activities and sports. I even served as the secretary of my hostel. As a result of these extracurricular engagements, academics remained low on my priority list.”

It was during his MS that he was exposed to serious research. His MS was on virtual reality and allowed him to combine his software and mechanical engineering skills. As part of his thesis, he worked on augmented reality based open liver surgery.

“In this project, we took a 2D CT scan of the liver across various cross-sections and used them to generate a 3D model via computer graphics. The model was then put on special eyeglasses worn by the surgeon. The effect of each action of the surgeon on the liver was simulated and transmitted to the glasses in real time. This enabled the surgeon to ascertain what was happening inside the liver, without having to cut across various cross-sections to see that.

Augmented reality was in its nascent stages at that time and was increasingly finding new applications across industries. After graduating from SUNY, I joined a research based start-up called SoVoz, which was being run by a professor from University of Pennsylvania. I worked on the development of training simulators. SoVoz was a great learning experience, because it gave me exposure to many different technologies.”

Hemanth got married in 2009. His wife, being a doctor, found it challenging to move to the US, because medical practitioners who obtain their education outside the US need to do a large part of their studies all over again in order to acquire a license to practice in the US. So, Hemanth quit SoVoz after almost three years and returned to India.

“At that time, I had no concrete plans. I had not looked for a job before returning to India and started thinking seriously about setting up something of my own. I met a lot of entrepreneurs in India during that period and figured out that entering the field of medical devices could be fruitful.”

A friend introduced Hemanth to an interesting project at the Defence Research Development Organization’s (DRDO) Center for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics (CAIR). CAIR had developed a Laparoscopic Surgery Simulator to help doctors train for laparoscopic surgeries. Laparoscopy involves inserting two probes into the body, one for imaging and the other for conducting the operation. Doctors need very good hand-eye coordination for laparoscopic surgeries, because they have to operate on the body while looking at a screen. This simulator allowed them to practice in a virtual 3D environment.

After eight to nine years of research, DRDO was looking to sell off the technology to interested private players who could then commercialize it. Hemanth decided to enter the fray. He met the concerned people at CAIR and completed the formalities. However, several months passed, and despite visiting DRDO numerous times, he could not make any progress. After almost a year, having realized that the authorities had no serious interest, he decided to abandon the idea.

It was a tough period for Hemanth and people around him were getting anxious about his future. In 2010, he enrolled for a year-long post-graduate diploma in Intellectual Property Rights at NALSAR University of Law, Hyderabad. Simultaneously, he started work on a new idea – a gesture- based gaming application.

The application involved a camera to capture simple hand gestures and an LCD screen to project the pictures. The software generated random pictures and interpreted users’ hand gestures. Users could swipe and select a picture, and the selected picture would break up into jumbled pieces. Users could then entertain themselves by arranging the jumbled pieces using hand gestures. Photoplay, as Hemanth called it, took about three months to develop, but unfortunately, it did not sell. “Even though it did not yield any positive economic results, it gave me hands-on experience in developing gesture-based user interaction.” Thankfully, the experience wasn’t wasted, as it led to something more interesting and meaningful.

“At a boutique one day, I realized that it takes a lot of time and effort for women to try on several saris before they purchased any. This is a hassle for both the customer and the store owner. I thought that AR could be used to superimpose the virtual collection of saris on the captured image of a customer, which could then be projected onto a screen for viewing. That would enable the customer to easily try the whole collection in a short time, by simply using hand gestures to change to the next outfit.”

Learning from Photoplay’s experience, this time, Hemanth did a thorough market research before embarking on the project. The product seemed to have good potential. In late 2010, he finally started working on TrialAR wholeheartedly. “I rented a small 100 sq ft office space and hired two eager-to-learn interns from an engineering college. The company, Imaginate, was formally incorporated in January 2011.

“The first prototype was ready by mid-2011 and we tried it at a boutique. Each outfit was put on a mannequin and the mannequin was pictured from a certain distance. The whole collection was similarly digitized. A 42-inch LCD screen was then put on a wall and a camera was placed at a suitable location to capture the customer’s image and hand gestures. The system worked perfectly and the customers were quite delighted to use it.

Now that the system was tested, I started looking for investors to scale things up. However, I did not have any prior experience in doing that. It was also taking a lot of my time, which meant that further development of the product suffered.”

At that time, Pawan Kosaraju, Hemanth’s friend from IIT Madras joined the company. “He had faith in my idea and left his job at KPMG, Germany to come back to India and work with me. This eased the workflow.”

After successfully creating the desktop version of the system for physical stores, the company started working on the web-based version for online retail stores. Several e- commerce firms expressed keen interest in the product, but the company did not want to roll the product out before perfecting it.

“We then developed a patented application for collaborative shopping, which allowed people to seek the opinion of their spouses and friends online, in real time, before they finalized their choice.”

In November 2011, Imaginate was named among the Top 10 Product Companies in India by NASSCOM. In March 2012, it was selected as the Startup of the Year by the Indian Chapter of the Startup Leadership Program. Around the same time, MIT Technology Review named Hemanth among the top Indian innovators.

In June 2012, Imaginate was selected for Start-up Chile, a program by the Chilean Government to attract early stage, high-potential entrepreneurs. The government provides each selected start-up an equity free amount of $40,000 to bootstrap their start-ups in Chile and use it as a platform to go global.

“In August 2012, I travelled to Silicon Valley to explore possibilities and a lot of people showed interest in the technology. Qualcomm promised to fund us, if we could develop applications that enable the use of our technology via smartphones. So, that’s the next step for us.

We are also improving the technology to enable better tacking – that is, enabling the clothes to move as the person moves. Currently, the technology does not take into account the body contours of the individual; thus, that is another area for improvement.

It may not completely replace the physical trial room, but it definitely enables you to reduce the number of choices that you would like to physically try out.”

Imaginate estimates the market potential for TrialAR to be about
4000 crore (about $800 million) in India alone. They have been showcasing the technology abroad at fashion and technology events and have received favorable offers from some luxury fashion brands and online apparel retailers.

Besides TrialAR, Hemanth is also working on other products based on augmented reality.

“We have developed an AR-based smartphone app that has the potential to make every newspaper like the
Daily Prophet
of the
Harry Potter
series. You need to switch on the app, roll the camera of your smartphone over the headline and then hold the phone over the accompanying picture. The app will find relevant video clips on the internet and superimpose the video over the photo. You will thus read the article on your phone screen with the video playing inside the photo-frame. If you move your phone away from the newspaper, the video will resize to fit the frame of the photo; if you move the phone laterally, the video will adjust its position to still remain superimposed on the photo. So, on your phone screen, you will always see the text from the newspaper being captured by your camera and the video content generated by the app.”

As Hemanth continues on his journey to bring fantasy to reality, or rather, augmented reality, this will be one of the many successes that are lined up for him.