MeitY Startup Hub and Meta collaborate to accelerate XR Technology Startups

Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) Startup Hub in collaboration with Meta will launch a program to support and accelerate XR technology startups across India.

• India is uniquely placed to play a pivotal role in the metaverse with a large talent pool of creators, developers and a vibrant technology ecosystem.
• The world looks to it for supply technology, innovation and talent to cater to the greater demand for digital products. 
• This collaboration is part of the Indian Government’s efforts for skilling in emerging and future technologies.

MeitY Startup Hub:

• The MeitY Startup Hub is a national platform focused on promoting technology innovation, start-ups, and the creation of intellectual properties.
• It was launched in 2019.
• MeitY Startup Hub (MSH) aims to serve as an integrating platform for startups and incubators.
• According to the government, it has supported more than 3,000 startups, with a vision to ramp it up to more than 10,000 in the next three to five years.
  
  

XR Technology:

• Extended reality, or XR, is an emerging realm of technology that combines real and virtual environments.
• Extended Reality (XR) is an umbrella term encapsulating Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR), Mixed Reality (MR), and everything in between.
• The term is also used to refer to human-machine interactions generated through wearables and computer technology.
• It includes representative forms such as augmented reality, mixed reality and virtual reality and the areas interpolated among them.
• The term first popped up in the 1960s when Charles Wyckoff filed a patent for his silver-halide “XR” film, intended for photographing extremely bright light events, such as nuclear explosions.
  
  

Potential of XR

• Globally, XR is poised to be a US$160 billion industry by 2023.
• In India, the XR spending will exceed US$6.5 billion by 2022 from under US$2 billion in 2020 due to growing smartphone penetration—a key driving factor—which is expected to double during the same timeframe.