With more people taking up photography as a career, the challenge of finding new technologies that help one capture the world in creative ways is the need of the hour.
Filling that gap is Kshitij Marwah’s Tesseract Imaging, which has developed India’s first indigenous 360-degree 3D camera, called Methane.
With the ability to generate authentic virtual reality (VR) content for devices like the Oculus Rift and Google Cardboard, the camera allows one to experience a location. “What we took a bet on was that megapixel rate (for cameras) was not the way to go,” Kshitij explains. “At the same time the evolution of 3D, virtual reality, the development of Oculus Rift and Google Cardboard was becoming really big. And we realised that there was no real camera to capture content for it — most of it was virtual renders.”
In development since October last year, the camera is completely researched, designed and manufactured in India — except for the processor which is sourced from ARM, and a customised lens from Sony.
However, Kshitij, who heads MIT’s Media Lab and used to organise design workshops in India, says one of the main reasons for building the camera — and for starting Tesseract itself — was to help promote technology manufacturing in India.
Heading to Harvard Medical School and MIT Computer Science Labs in 2009 after graduating in Computer Science from IIT Delhi, Kshitij says his desire to help India with technology manufacturing locally grew after his year-and-a-half of researching and developing low-cost healthcare and big data tech. “What I realised there is that we look up to the MITs, Harvards and Stanfords of the world, but all of those can be started in India,” he says, “We just need to actually do it.” He later moved to India to put his beliefs into practise.
While the next step for Tesseract is developing a video recording capability for Methane, Kshitij’s vision is much larger: “I will still be making crazy innovative technologies, because that’s what I love doing the most. My vision is that in 10 years we have at least one $1 billion hardware manufacturing company in the country. And I hope we can inspire another company to do the same.”
