At the present scenario, industries among all the sectors including manufacturers, healthcare, retailers, educationists, among others have been gearing up for Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR) as well as Mixed Reality (MR). These techniques have been used for training to reduce fatalities and costs, product try-on, and marketing.
With a similar vision, Gurugram-based Queppelin has been utilising AR, VR, and AI to transform into a deep tech innovation company and provide the best AR/VR to transform businesses. For this week’s feature, we got in touch with the founders of Queppelin — Dr Pulkit Mathur and Prafulla Mathur — to gain deeper insights on how the startup is using emerging technologies to transform businesses.
Founded in 2010 by Dr Pulkit Mathur and Prafulla Mathur, Queppelin is an AR/VR applications development company. Being rock music enthusiasts, the founders derived the unique name by combining names of two popular rock bands — Queen and Led Zeppelin. The company has raised more than $4 Million from marquee VCs Mangrove Capital Partners (Netherlands) and Simile Ventures (Luxembourg).
Flagship Products
The platforms of Queppelin include VR-based training solutions for the manufacturing industry, AR furniture retail platform, consumer AR solutions for merchants to create AR marketing experiences and MR applications for pharmaceutical companies.
The founders mentioned three flagship products of the company:
- Workforce Training Platform for manufacturing companies: According to the founders, the realistic nature of the VR workforce training platform allows companies to simulate real-life scenarios and situations that are otherwise costly to create
- Retail Augmented Reality: This lets e-retailers convert their apps into AR powerhouses. With this product, the users can try-on various SKUs in furniture, shoes and clothing before buying
- WebAR and apps based AR gaming platform for brands
How Is It Different From Other Products In The Market?
To this question, the founders replied that they initially start by helping clients assess how best AR/VR can transform their businesses. The stated, “It is a consultative approach that we have, and it helps unite the business needs to the world of tech most effectively.”
Use Of AI/ML And IoT At Queppelin
The company deploy AI/ML and IoT in the following aspects:-
- Crop Monitoring: An intelligent system is built for monitoring a crop field with the help of IoT sensors for light, humidity, temperature, soil moisture, and automating the irrigation system
- Pest and Weed Control in Agriculture: Identification of pests and weeds using image recognition
- Smart Farming: Smart Farming is based on IoT technologies that enable growers and farmers to reduce waste and enhance productivity. This includes i) collecting data with IoT devices such as pH level indicators, intruder alert, pest, water drainage, ii) process in a central hub through a low-frequency antenna to the central gateway or Neural Network, iii) past data analysis juxtaposed with current data to predict the crop health and assessment, better crop management, iv) see real-time data of field through AR/VR, understand the preventions can be taken, and chat with experts with actual footage of field.
- Retail: Computer vision has been deployed for foot detection and then superimpose various shoe variants for the user to try-on
Core Tech Stack
At the core tech stack, for AR and VR applications, Queppelin uses Unity, AR-Kit, AR-Core, Wikitude, AR Foundation, Unreal Engine & Vuforia. For products like WebAR, the company use Three.js, AR.js along with platforms like 8th Wall, and in AI, they use OpenCV, ML, PyTorch and TensorFlow.
Hiring Talent Crunch
According to the founders, the company usually hires developers with experience in AR, VR and AI platforms. They added, “Along with this, we also hire developers who have an exceptional understanding of tech concepts and logic building, and train them on the platform we work on.”
Roadmap
Queppelin has developed VR platforms to help thousands of manufacturing staff to train better, AR platforms for museums and merchants, and streaming platforms which stream billions of bytes of data every day. In the next few years, the company is planning to be a crucial player of the future that AR is creating by enabling thousands of businesses with their AR plans. In the next 5 years, Quepellin has planned to launch 5-10 new AR platforms for specific industries with a revenue target of $50 million.
