XR Startup Program: MeitY Startup Hub (MSH) and Meta collectively jointly launched the ‘XR Startup Program’ to support and accelerate XR technology startups in India.

Key Points:

• The MeitY Startup Hub, an initiative of MeitY, is a national platform focused on promoting technology innovation, start-ups, and the creation of intellectual properties.
• Currently, it has around 3000+ tech startups supported, with a vision to ramp it up to more than ten thousand startups in the next three to five years.

About the Program:

• The XR Startup Program is an accelerator program aimed at supporting and accelerating extended reality (XR) startups in India.
• This program focuses on skilling and building technological capabilities for the metaverse, and will help shape the ecosystem for these emerging technologies, including Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) in the country.
• It would aid 40 early-stage startups working in the extended reality technologies by providing a grant of Rs.20 lakh each.
• A Grand Challenge would be set up to encourage early-stage innovators in industries like agri-tech and climate action, healthcare, education, learning, gaming and entertainment and skills, tourism, and sustainability.
• It would also support startups and innovators by building consumer connections, joint venture prospects and fundraising.
• Assistance would be provided to innovators so they could move up from the research and development stage to produce useful products and services.
• Under this initiative, 80 innovators would be shortlisted to attend a bootcamp.
• Of these 16 would be provided grants to develop minimum viable products/prototypes.

Implementation:

• The program would be implemented by International Institute of Information Technology – Hyderabad Foundation, Hyderabad, Telangana (CIE IIIT-H); Gujarat University Startup and Entrepreneurship Council (GUSEC), Ahmedabad, Gujarat; AIC SMU Technology Business Incubation Foundation (AIC-SMUTBI), Rangpo, Sikkim and Foundation for Innovation and Technology Transfer (FITT), IIT Delhi, New Delhi.

Funding:

• It would be financially backed by Meta’s XR Programs and Research Fund – a two-year investment in programs and research with industry partners, civil rights groups, governments, NGOs and academic institutions.

MeitY Startup Hub:

• MeitY Startup Hub (MSH) is an initiative of the Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology (MeitY).
• The main goal of MSH is to achieve the Indian Government’s goals of promoting technology innovation, startups and creation of intellectual properties.
• This nodal organization would serve as the MeitY's central hub for national coordination, facilitation and monitoring center that integrates all the incubation centers, start-ups, and innovation-related activities.

What is XR technology?

• Extended reality (XR) is a term referring to all real-and-virtual combined environments and human-machine interactions generated by computer technology and wearables.
• It includes representative forms such as augmented reality (AR), mixed reality (MR) and virtual reality (VR) and the areas interpolated among them.
• Although AR and VR offer a wide range of revolutionary experiences, the same underlying technologies are powering XR.
• XR is a rapid growing field being applied in a wide range of ways, entertainment, marketing, real estate, training, and remote work.