The Unconventional Industry - Imaginate: A Perfect Shopping Solution

We all get frustrated after waiting for so long at a queue outside the trial room in an apparel store. And what if after a long wait you got the trial but the dress doesn’t look as much good at you as you were really excited about the dress would be. At that moment we feel exhausted after that exercise. Same experience we have while shopping online, we’re not sure about the clothes that it would look good on you or not and ordered the cloth. After getting the cloth when we tried it same, the attire appears not too good, as per our expectations. Do you ever try a cloth on imagination, how will the attire look on me? Now no more need to feel exhausted while shopping at an apparel store or at any online store. Get a closure look at the attire before taking the decision whether to purchase it or not. Confused? How? Imaginate – Trial using Augmented Reality is the answer.

Well, the solution to the problem has been developed by Hemanth Satyanarayana “TrialAR or Trail room using Augmented Reality” the technology helping people to let them try clothes digitally, without having need to wear them actually. Isn’t it sounds’ great? Without actually wearing the clothes the one got to know about the apparel how it will gonna look. Let’s know more about the technology that is going to be the future of the ecommerce market. This is our new story of “The Unconventional Industry”, the story is about Augmented Reality-based Virtual Trial Rooms.

Imaginate’s Commencement Journey:

Imaginate a Hyderabad-based startup and also established in the US, on an augmented reality-based technology founded by Hemanth Satyanarayana in the last of the 2010 and operation started in the mid of 2011. Hemanth completed his graduation in Mechanical Engineering in 2003 from IIT-Madras and did his Masters in Virtual Reality (VR). After his MS he worked with several of startups in the USA before coming back to India. In 2009, he got married, after marriage; he went on the shopping with his wife and understood the pain behind the purchase of a particular saree, which would go better.

“At a boutique one day, I realized that it takes a lot of time and effort for women to try on several sarees 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 sarees 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 using hand gestures to change to the next outfit,” said Hemanth Satyanarayana.

He started a thorough market research on the technology-based project and he found a good potential for this kind of project in the market. He started working on the project of TrialAR from late 2010. He rented a small 100 sq ft space for office and hired two engineering students, who were eager-to-learn new things, as an intern. The first model was ready in mid-2011 and they tried it at a boutique with a mannequin and a 42-inch LCD screen. They set up a camera at a suitable place from where it can easily capture the customer’s image and hand gestures and LCD put on a wall. Customers were delighted with the TrialAR technology use.

“Now that the system was tested, I started looking for investors to scale things up. However, I didn’t 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,” said Hemanth.

Funding and Investments of Imaginate:

In Feb 2017, Imaginate – TrialAR using Augmented Reality raised $500K (Rs 3.35 crore) seed funding from SRI Capital, Philadelphia’s seed stage venture fund. With this seed funding raised by the company, utilizing in providing collaboration tools, such as VR, AR and MR (mixed reality) in industrial training, design and maintenance in Indian and the US markets.

“Imaginate’s collaboration platform NuSpace is like the Webex of VR and AR. It will revolutionise the way people collaborate and learn by leveraging the best of both – a physical classroom-like environment and the ease of a digital conferencing platform like Webex or Skype,” said Sashi Reddi, MD, SRI Capital.

Accomplishments of Imaginate:

Imaginate has developed an intelligent digital apparel and jewellery trial room platform, to make shopping easier than ever before for both the shopper and retailer. The technology has been developed with the cooperation with a couple of apparel retailers. TriaiAR making the shopping experience easier by just standing in front of an electronic mirror, digital display and swipe the dresses with the hand gesture and easily know which is more perfect. Through this TrialAR product, it became simpler for the apparel store retailer to understand their customers need and taste.

TrialAR (Trial using Augmented Reality): This is using in the e-commerce and m-commerce retail apparel stores visualizing the apparel and jewellery Trial Room driven by data analytics.

TrialAR- Web: This is using on any e-commerce website. The products on e-commerce website can easily trial by the shopper and making the shopping world easier for both.

NuSpace: Imaginate’s this product NuSpace can be a solution to the retail, healthcare, defence, education and entertainment segments, amongst other. From a manufacturing opinion, it can also be used in the collaborative design and in industrial training. It operates as primarily in the B2B space specialization in training and education.

“With just a 2 Mbps connection, every NuSpace user can communicate with one another across geographies through their realistic avatars. It is less than the minimum internet speed that an HD video connection would need,” notifies Satyanarayana.

Imaginate was featured in top 10 Product of the company by NASSCOM at Product LaunchPAD 2011 and also a Microsoft BizSpark startup. The founder also won the prestigious MIT TR35 Young Innovator award and is co-inventor of a US patent on Virtual Locomotion controller. The company is a Gartner Top 3 Cool Vendor that is operating in the space of Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality and Mixed Reality.

Imaginate’s Competitors:

Imaginate launched in 2011 and working on the various AR and VR based platform. Now it is not the only company working on the AR and VR platform various other startups join the race of AR and VR, some is working on AR projects and some in VR. The major startups in the field other than Imaginate are a Noida-based virtual reality solutions startup SmartVizX; SpectraVR, a Mumbai-based virtual reality content studio; Virtual Mirror, Ingage, Realise, Absentia, DAQRI, Marxent Labs, EON Reality, Otherworld Interactive, Vuzix, Atheer, among others. Recently Amazon, the online giant has added the feature of augmented reality (AR) shopping.

“We are working on a few pilots with large corporations like Dassault Systèmes, Honeywell, etc. With the Dassault pilot, we intend to provide better support to CATIA & DELMIA model format in NuSpace and make our customers’ engineering data accessible on the platform,” said Hemanth Satyanarayana.

Imaginate’s products include GiftAR, which is a mobile gifting app for virtual video message augmented on the physical pictures; Dres.sy, a collaborative retailer platform to try out clothes virtually and also share their experience on social networking platform; FirstShow, an application-based AR platform showing movie trailers on digital posters or printed posters; and open liver surgery using augmented reality LivAR.

Future Glory of Imaginate:

It is a great unique platform and people are loving the platform because through this people are enjoying their shopping without wasting so much time on standing in a queue and waiting for their turn; after that, the attire doesn’t match up with the expectations and wasted all the time. So people liking the technology. Now people are also accepting new ideas, technology when selling and marketing is a major obstacle to prepare at minimal resources.

TrialAR has a tremendous opportunity in many areas where technology can easily be used, such as in Real Estate sector, where unfinished real estate project can easily be visualized; for ISRO, scientific research-based; AI can help the scientific research institute in their cost-cutting and help in quality research. In Healthcare Industry where precision-based surgery are very tricky and the success rate is also not good. In the healthcare sector, they can use both AI and Robotics to make precision-based surgery a success although this is very tricky to do so.

They have specifically mentioned that they had done a project on surgical apparatus using Augmented Reality, aiding surgeons with better real-time accuracy and minimal blood loss performing surgery. Although the founder has done such kind of healthcare sectors project during his masters, whereas it was not commercially viable. So they can continue now with the same for commercial use. They can combine AI and Robotics for better results in precision-based surgery but the industry is so complex where there is no chance of committing any mistake even a minimal one that will pervert the company’s reputation.

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