Tesseract: The company behind the JioGlass

One of the biggest unveilings by the Ambanis at Reliance's Annual General meet was the JioGlass, a virtual reality eyewear that allows people to connect with each other in real time. At RIL's 43rd AGM, the JioGlass was demonstrated by heir Isha Ambani Piramal, in a 2-D format, who spoke to her brother Akash Ambani in a 3D format, presenting charts in an office set-up.

The JioGlass was designed and built by Tesseract — a five-year old deep-tech startup that was acquired by RIL in 2019. Founded by Kshitij Marwah at a Mumbai warehouse, the startup is a subsidiary of RIL but is run independently, it told BloombergQuint. Reliance had bought 92.7% stake in the company and had invested Rs 10.12 crore in May, according to filings.

Tesseract develops technology for Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) oriented products such as cameras, headsets, smart glasses for companies. It also provides a platform for developers to build apps and content.

With a team of 55 employees based out of Reliance Corporate Park in Navi Mumbai, the startup has launched products such as a virtual reality 360 degree camera called Methane, largely taken up by the real estate websites and a VR 360 degree camera called Quark, according to the Quint report.

According to a YourStory report, the company has filed at least five patents so far for optical and hardware designs, scene design algorithms and 360 VR editing in augmented and virtual reality:

• Augmented Reality: 1. Optical Design: Curved-off-axis parabolic holographic optics that enable the appearance of holograms. 2. Scene Understanding: Algorithms for tracking, headset localisation in 3D, and environment understanding.
• Virtual Reality: 1. Optical Design: A novel arrangement of dual wide field of view lenses to cover and record 360 VR photographs and videos. 2. Hardware Design: Reference design for high throughput cameras to record and transmit 4K video data. 3. 360 VR Editing: GPU-optimised algorithms for stitching, transformation, object tracking, and reframing.

Tesseract had also developed the Jio HoloBoard in 2019, a mixed reality/ MR headset for Reliance.

JioGlass, a first-of-its-kind native product, will be key to Tesseract's journey, heavily reliant however on Jio's 5G ecosystem, which is yet to be made available for trials.