JOIN USWomen's Day 2021 special: Meet Indian women who made top-class apps and games
Unlike pure science, software, and app development, there is a wide gender gap in terms of women leading the companies. However, as we stand at the turn of the 21st century, things are changing for good at least in India.
To mark the International Women Days 2021, DH had the opportunity to interact with top Indian female personalities who shattered the glass ceiling to launch their mobile application companies and gaining popularity worldwide.
Prayoga (Developed by Parjanya Creative Solutions)
As the name suggests, it is a fitness app with a primary focus on Yoga. It uses Motion Tracking and AR can be used to help users get to learn new poses, you also get realtime feedback on how you are performing the Yoga pose.
The origin of the Prayoga app
After working for about 15 years in the US for several startups and some of the biggest companies in the world, Raksha Rao and Krishna thought of setting up their own firm in India.
They joined the 'Startup India' programme and with Bred Ventures as a client from US who gave them projects to be done on watchOS, they started to setup Parjanya Creative Solutions in their home.
They worked with a team of engineers who were previously World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC) scholars to develop the Yoga posture correction application called Prayoga.
How is Prayoga different from other others?
"When we started testing out other Yoga apps, in particular, one thing that we found was the fact that most of the apps stopped after showing a video of how an asana should be performed. You as a user, would not know if you are doing it correctly or not. So the feedback that you would get from a real instructor in a studio was definitely missing," said Raksha Rao
"With Prayoga, this was the exact problem we set out to solve. We wanted to create an app that was very much Indian at heart while it was used worldwide. Yoga-based applications fit this description perfectly. While most Yoga apps that we used have beautiful instructional videos, Prayoga aims to go a few steps beyond. Along with our gorgeously-produced videos, an animated 3D model of the instructor, and real-time feedback using ARKit and body tracking, we are able to tell you exactly which movement can you fix in order to get to that perfect form in an asana. A history of your performance of each asana is recorded, and beautiful graphs help you visualise your progress across time. Specially designed courses can assist in targeting specific areas you may want to work on and carefully curated routines, timely reminders, and an intelligent UI to help you practice Yoga the way it should be - as a part of your lifestyle," Rao added.
Prayoga team is one of the few indie apps-developer companies to join the Apple App Accelerator programme. The company said the member got access to engineers to help resolve technical issues and also got guidance on UI/UX on our app and even helped them understand and make some of the best business decisions.
On asked how the Prayoga app makes use of mobile features to offer real-time feedback to users. The company said the app uses the new Body tracking technology introduced by Apple at WWDC 2019 and improved in the latest framework to use the back or front cameras to track, generate and identify a set of joints on the user's body. Once this is identified, we can easily match it with a 'Master Pose' that is saved for each asana, and we can tell the user exactly where they have gone wrong, all in real-time and while the user is performing the asana.
Apart from the body tracking framework, the app uses the Quick look framework to showcase the AR instructor, CoreML framework for all of the underlying Machine learning, and feedback system. It also uses the recently introduced SwiftUI development framework for easily creating the rich UI system in the application.
On the day of the debut, Prayoga received 100,000 impressions on the App Store and close to 1000 downloads in the first week.
City Car Racing Simulator 2019 (Developed by Appsoleut Coders LLP)
The City Car Racing Simulator 2019 is said to be set in a large open-world city with an extremely detailed city environment and stunning HD graphics to offer an immersive gaming experience. The company Appsoleut Coders LLP is co-founded by Gurugram-based Damini Pahwa.
Damini has been working for over nine years in the mobile gaming industry. Within the company, she is the CEO and primarily focused on business development and collaborations and user acquisition & marketing.
Origin of City Car Racing Simulator 2019
"The biggest reason for us to venture into a car game was our enthusiasm and love for cars! Being an avid driver myself I was immediately excited at the prospect of developing a car driving game. After a lot of research and playing tons of games we finally came to the conclusion that there were a lot of fast and wild racing games in the market, but none that were about safe driving. So we went ahead and worked on a real-world simulation game that is not only fun and entertaining but also teaches the player how to drive a car safely, following road signs and traffic signals like in the real world. But we have just started, we have big plans for the game in the future!," Damini Pahwa noted.
Besides the City Car Racing Simulator 2019, Damini's company makes five other games including-- Indian Train Simulator - 2018, Demolition Derby 2019, Flight Simulator 2019, City Motorbike Racing, and Magic War - Castle Defense.
Which of the company's apps are most popular around the world?
"Our game, Car Parking - Driving School (CPDS), is immensely popular in countries like the US, Europe, India, and Japan. In fact, it consistently remains among the Top 20 games in the Racing category, in almost all these countries. CPDS has been downloaded over 8 Million times since it was released on iOS and has over 2 Million monthly active users. In fact our user base is pretty demanding! We get regular emails and reviews with different feature requests for the game and being a gamer-centric company we try to cater to as many requests as we can," Damini said.
What makes your app is more compelling than others?
Damini said- "The one thing that I think differentiates our games from others on the App Store is our gamer-centric approach towards them. We listen very intently to our user base and try to give them what they ask for. This creates a sense of loyalty in the player and also helps increase the time a player spends in our game".
MysticLand World Discovery (Developed by The Unscripted Life)
This app is designed for kids between ages 7 to 12 and helps them get the age-appropriate latest news, science topics, and technology.
Origin of MysticLand World Discovery
Until three years ago, the two founders of The Unscripted Life company- Abhinaya Chandrasekhar and Venkat were strangers.
Abhinaya had traveled to 35 countries, while Venkat had been to 22. In the unlikeliest place, they met on Facebook, and then, they began talking about building a company that helped kids discover the world better.
For about two and half years, they built a series of products such as guides, journals, maps, apps for traveling kids.
"About six months ago, the focus of their entire company shifted to helping children discover the world all-year-round and sharpen their smartness quotient. This was the birth of MysticLand - a magical fantasy universe. The world of MysticLand is a beautiful place with magical beings called Mysticals and Mysticbeasts," Abhinaya Chandrasekhar said.
The four key characters or Mysticals interact with kids via the MysticLand World Discovery app and guide their game-based learning journey.
"The beta version of app went live in January 2021 with MysticPost and the Fact machine. So far, the app has seen 2000+ downloads with efforts only at migrating existing users of The Unscripted Life to MysticLand. In the next two weeks, MysticQuest along with a full-fledged reward system will go live," the company said.
"Ranging from simple, yet powerful UI/UX suggestions, tech integrations such as Augmented Reality as well as an introduction to platform possibilities like building widgets, these recommendations from Apple engineers have been our guiding principle to take this idea ahead," Abhinaya noted.
On asked on what new feature we can expect in the MysticLand app in the coming weeks, Abhinaya said her team is looking for powerful storytelling to help kids learn better.
"The next set of features currently in our plans is an AR language learning experience, as well as the time-tested good ol' comic book version of world discovery," Abhinaya added.
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