Mumbai: Meta, formerly known as Facebook, has announced a new program in India focused on Mixed Reality (MR) development. The program offers a $250K award for home grown companies and developers to create applications and experiences using Meta’s Presence Platform. The Presence Platform encompasses Meta’s wide range of machine perception and AI capabilities for the Meta Quest Platform and the Metaverse. The objective of the fund is to promote innovation and establish a national XR (Extended Reality) technology ecosystem.
Developers participating in the program will have the opportunity to build apps using Meta’s Presence Platform and receive financial grants. They will also receive dedicated mentoring and guidance from Meta Reality Labs experts. Furthermore, selected participants will be able to upload their products to the Quest App Lab, becoming part of Meta’s expanding developer ecosystem. At the end of the program, these start-ups will be introduced to prominent local venture capital funds.
Sandhya Devanathan, VP for Meta in India, states that Meta is committed to nurturing the XR ecosystem in India. The Presence Platform plays a crucial role in Meta’s vision for the metaverse, aiming to make virtual experiences more tangible and accessible. The company believes that this fund and program will accelerate the creation and adoption of Virtual Reality (VR) and MR experiences in India, providing Indian developers with opportunities to showcase their innovations on a global scale.
The fund is now open for applications, inviting both established and emerging start-ups and developers to explore the capabilities offered by the Presence Platform. Selected developers will need to integrate the Presence Platform into existing or new Meta Quest apps using various features, such as Passthrough, scene understanding, spatial anchors, shared spatial anchors, voice SDK, text-to-speech, Interaction SDK for hand tracking, and social presence APIs.
According to a report by market research firm Statista, the global XR market, encompassing Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR), and MR, reached $29.26 billion in 2022 and is projected to reach $100 billion by 2026.
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