Bala Aatral Solutions, a Chennai-based start-up in the serious gaming industry, has won grants worth Rs. 3 crore from the Ministry of Defence (MoD), under the Innovations for Defence Excellence (IDEX) platform to promote innovative technologies.
The grants are to work on developing Augmented Reality (AR)-Virtual Reality (VR) solution for airplane mechanics, and a VR-based training simulator for helicopter pilots, within two years, as per the MoD mandate.
Bala’s AR/VR solution for airplane mechanics eliminates the need for the technicians to spend hours reading through manuals with thousands of lines of instructions. The solution will display relevant audio/visual cues for the technicians through smart glass to aid their repairing task.
Bala’s VR-based simulator will eliminate the need for a real helicopter for training and evaluation. The simulator will have a virtual cockpit environment to test various capabilities of pilots such as their emergency response and cognitive loads, serving as a highly economical and effective evaluation solution.
One of the focus areas of Aatral is ‘digital twin’ technologies that refer to virtual representation of physical objects or processes that would serve as the real-time digital environment especially for experiential learning.
Aatral has developed an industrial safety platform to create customised AR/VR training solutions for employees in construction, manufacturing and processing industries.
