An artistic combination of vision with technology, Virtual Reality is marking its roots when not everyone knows about it. A company, Meraki is performing it every day with a passion for serving some amazing experience to its consumers as well as businesses. Meraki, a Greek word which means the soul, the creativity, or love, the essence of yourself put into your work. The same way the team describes their work.

Three Technology geeks Arvind Ghorwal, Parth Choksi, and Agam Garg along with a filmmaker Sairam Sagiraju, had thought of something incredible for the film fraternity combining the technology with creativity resulting in virtual reality. Being in Mumbai and thinking over films has been just complimentary. But, their participation was contrasting.

It was November 2015 when they started with a 360 degree concert movie of musician Hardwell’s performance in Mumbai, bringing in the concept of virtual reality in the limelight for the first time in India. This computer-generated Virtual Reality provides a three-dimensional environment for its users by portraying him as the lead in the film. They say “Our aim is to create exciting content that emotionally connects with our audience while we push the boundaries of Virtual Reality”.

Men at Work – The Team

Arvind is an Ujjain boy and experience film making for the first time in IIT- Bombay. After that, he was on in this journey. He made many short films and documentaries then and has been awarded for the work from India Fest Goa, By2Coffee, Kala Ghoda and Talenthouse.

Sairam is a film writer and director with a keen interest in visual storytelling. He is the director of Grammy award-winning album Winds of Samsera. In 2012, he was honored as one of Bangalore’s youth icons by ‘This Week Bangalore’. Also, he developed a film data model for Prime Focus Technologies and headed the Production of Content for the Housing.com. Parth has been a project engineer in ITC. He holds a strong passion for working in the areas of branding and marketing. Agam has worked for oracle and Credit Suisse. He has worked as a Java Developer for Oracle and as a Credit Risk Analyst at Credit Suisse, he is also keen on photography.

Work

In such a short span of time, they have made it big to have partners as Star Sports, Sunburn, Firstpost, and Mood Indigo. They contribute or create virtual reality in a variety of areas as tourism, education, events, sports, news, advertising, wedding, and real estate. Meraki’s biggest project is the Asia Cup, held in February. Meraki captured the world’s first cricket match in VR for the India vs. Bangladesh. Meraki along with IIT Bombay FilmFest presented ‘Strangers Again’, a Virtual Reality Short Film, which was a recent production and is now available on Milk VR, a platform by Samsung. They also conducted workshops in IIT Bombay and Vidyalankar School of Information Technology.

VR Future

The VR market is expected to hit $150 billion by 2020. VR is heading in every possible direction in the world. Be it a film making, games, videos, tours, animation, education. VR has started placing its leg in the automobile industry too with some great benefits. Experiencing virtual reality, Marcus Kuehne, Audi’s virtual-reality project lead gave his views and he thinks wearing the glasses and watching is as real as one is really in the car. The customer is experiencing an unforgettable tour by VR, encouraging these businesses. If we talk about going places one could visit the places even without being there using VR. It makes you realize that you are there in real that is why it is Virtual Reality.

The Bottom Line

According to Meraki, India will be a key market for VR in the near future due to millions of users of gadgets and technology. The introduction of the low-cost headset would be one of the key steps in increasing the VR market size of India as now it is quite expensive. Officially introduced by Meraki in India, Virtual Reality has marked an awestruck presence in such a brief time that indicates there is an upcoming thunder of Virtual Reality. Moving on to a UN- commissioned project with Ricky Kej, Meraki is now going to unleash more powerful experiences with VR.