Bengaluru startup seeks to ease high cost of bullets

In the movies, a villain may not be worth a "bullet," but in real life, the high cost of sniper ammunition has prompted a Bengaluru-based startup to come with a novel way for precision shootists to practice their craft.

Since October 2019, Koramangala-based Xarpie Labs has been developing a virtual reality landscape where military snipers and professional Olympic shooters can blast away at targets without spending a single rupee for a bullet.

Ankit Adhyapak, a 2018 IIT Kanpur alumnus, said that the idea came about after discovering that a single .338 calibre rifle bullet cost Rs 300.

"We realised that this made it comparatively costly for a sharpshooter to hone their skills, and saw a solution in virtual reality," he said, speaking to DH at DefExpo 2020 in Lucknow, on Wednesday.

The 30-person-strong startup set about creating a virtual world, utilising both day and night modes. After four months of development, the team showed off their virtual world, complete with atmospheric modelling, including wind to DH.

"There is a lot of mathematics that went into the model," Adhyapak said.

At the heart of the system is a real rifle modified with electronic systems and receivers.

Another member of the startup, 25-year-old Anuj Natraj, an engineering alumnus from the Manipal Institute of Technology, showed how it worked.

Donning virtual-reality goggles, and touching the rifle rendered the weapon in the digital world. Using the goggles to aim down the telescopic sight of the rifle, Natraj methodically shot at targets, in a world utilising realistically modelled wind strength and direction, atmospheric pressure, temperature, humidity, and bullet trajectory drop.

"We are now in the process of adding a system, which will actually try to induce a recoil kick to the rifle whenever the trigger is squeezed," Natraj said.

He added that the system also used a diagnostic scoring system to allow the user to improve his or her skills.

When asked if the system would be eventually sold to the Indian military, the team looked nonplussed. "So far we have not been approached by the army, but several professional shooters have expressed interest as has the Brazilian Embassy Attache at DefExpo," said Srikanth Karumbati, the startup's CTO.