Back from US, Bengaluru girl brings AR Yoga teacher to your iPhones

For the previous 20 years, Raksha Rao, 33, has been studying and practising Carnatic vocals and even ran a music college within the US with 50 college students. But this mom from Bengaluru now runs Parjanya Creative Solutions, the corporate behind Prayoga, an app that makes use of augmented actuality (AR) and physique monitoring expertise to assist customers study Yoga.
The concept to develop Prayoga got here from Rao and her husband’s private expertise of utilizing Yoga apps. “When you go to a trainer or a gym, what they try to do is, they’ll give you a set of exercises and you will have to perform in front of them. They come and correct you if the form is wrong. That part was really lacking in terms of all these apps,” Rao tells Indianexpress.com.
Rao was clear from the start that the Prayoga app would give some type of suggestions, mimicking how an teacher corrects individuals as if they’re attending an in-person session in a Yoga studio. The resolution to the issue was augmented actuality, a expertise that may superimpose a computer-generated picture on high of your view of the actual world. With the assistance of ARKit and physique monitoring, Rao’s group considered bringing an teacher proper inside your front room as a 3D render. All you want is your iPhone and you’ll study Yoga asanas and proper them as you carry out. The app additionally gives well-produced instruction movies.
Rao has been the power behind Prayoga, an app that makes use of augmented actuality (AR) and physique monitoring expertise to assist customers study Yoga. (Image credit score: Raksha Rao)
“We wanted to combine our passion areas with technology, and try to come up with an innovative product in this,” she says, including that her husband’s experience in AR and VR helped — he used to work at a Hollywood Studio in Los Angeles.
Rao, an MBA in Information Science from California State University and an engineer who moved again to India in 2019 together with her husband, says the event of the app has been carried out solely in-house. She and her husband primarily work on the event half together with product technique. Currently, Rao’s group has 10 individuals, a mixture of full-time staff and interns, and most of them ladies.
It’s been nearly a yr because the Prayoga app hit the App Store, and Rao and her group are already engaged on the second model. “Our aim for this app was to make Yoga a lifestyle, and not a fitness fad or anything,” she says. The current model of Prayoga has been nicely acquired, getting over 100,000 impressions on the App Store when the app initially debuted in June final yr.
Rao has been studying Carnatic music, the Indian classical music model for the previous 20 years. (Image credit score: Raksha Rao)
Based on the suggestions the app has acquired, the second model will embody as many as 75 asanas, created by Yoga specialists. The app additionally encompasses a customisable possibility the place you possibly can select a particular time and carry out Yoga asanas as per your wants. There can also be a brand new choice to mirror the app in your TV and see the teacher performing the motion on the large display.
But Rao isn’t carried out but. Being somebody studying and practising Carnatic classical vocal music for years, she needs to deliver this previous artwork kind to the plenty utilizing immersive applied sciences like AR and VR. “We are trying to bring a product that helps us do that,” says Rao, who’s about to finish her masters in Carnatic music from Jain University.