[dropcap]V[/dropcap]irtual Reality solutions company, SmartVizX, has announced the launch of a dedicated Research & Development facility in Bangalore that will focus on the development of high quality VR products.
This latest facility located at ORR Marthahalli in Bangalore is a step that will advance a fully fledged VR products company from its current, largely service based model. Currently, the company will kick off the R&D function with a team of 5 members to be led by Shailesh Kumar, from the Samsung VR (Virtual Reality) R&D team, who has over 15 years of experience.
Gautam Tewari, CEO & Founder, SmartVizX said, “Our R&D center here in Bangalore, will help us develop cutting edge VR based business solutions that will be an industry first in many ways. Our current focus is the architecture, engineering and construction industry.”
“We are bringing in features like VR based collaboration to our solutions. We are also looking at facilitating transactions through our VR platform and expect the R&D team to roll out this feature over the next 9 to 12 months,” added Tewari.
Founded in February 2015, it is currently one of the highest funded Indian startups in the VR domain. SmartVizX has raised a seed round of over half a million dollars ($500,000) from Indian Angel Network (IAN), and Stanford Angels and Entrepreneurs India (SA&E India) in March earlier this year.
The SmartVizX Team also plans to enter new sectors such as edutainment, game content; hospitality retail through their VR based solutions.
According to Digi-Capital’s new ‘Augmented/Virtual Reality Report 2015’, AR/VR is expected to reach a global valuation of $150 billion by 2020. A report by SuperData Research estimates that the VR Gaming market itself is worth $5.1 billion with a customer base of 55.8 million in 2016. These figures indicate a potential boom in the VR industry and a rising appetite for VRV based content.
