How Skillveri’s XR simulation boosts blue-collar jobs

Early last decade, Kannan Lakshminarayan and Sabarinath Nair found that young India aspired for white-collar jobs, but there were big opportunities in the automotive, manufacturing and construction sectors. Nair found reports about Chinese and Peruvian workers being hired to help execute Delhi airport’s terminal 3, and the Delhi metro projects. Why weren’t there enough Indians to do this?

Lakshminarayan, an engineer and entrepreneur, had already been thinking about utilising technology to scale up vocational training in the country. This was just before the National Skill Development Corporation was established.

Nair, an engineer who was then working in one of Lakshminarayan’s companies – an ATM software provider called Vortex Engineering – resolved to do something about the blue-collar gap. He researched the realm. He visited factories to understand the problems operators face. And then worked to build simulation products to skill blue-collar workers in areas like welding and painting.

This was a time when the tech startup realm was in its infancy. Most were focused on building mobile apps. Product companies weren’t in fashion, and what Nair had in mind was to build a hardware product company. Fortunately for him, he was in Chennai, and the IIT Madras ecosystem helped. “This ecosystem had a lot of focus on hardware and deep tech,” Nair says.

IIT Madras incubated and mentored the company, which was named Skillveri. The institute also provided the initial investment via soft loans, through schemes of the electronics & IT ministry, and the science & technology ministry.

The Skillveri team worked for “almost no money” initially. “We started with the welding simulator, so we spent a lot of time in factories with real welders. Whatever prototypes we built, we let them use it, and they gave us feedback,” recollects Nair.

It was challenging, considering their small scale, and that several components had to be imported. Immersive technology was then too expensive. “We were doing things in 2D, and were somehow trying to show 3D in 2D. But the moment the VR space became more mainstream – with the launch of the Oculus and XTC VR headsets – a lot of what we were building from scratch became available off the shelf,” says Nair.

Metaverse & XR

As the ecosystem around metaverse and XR (extended reality) grew, Skillveri adapted the technology to enhance their screens. “We brought gaming elements into the mechanics of training because we are dealing with people who are quite young – we had to make it interesting for them,” says Nair.

Before designing a new tool, Nair and team analyse in depth where technology can make a difference in the workflow, and positively impact the quality of the output – by guaranteeing the safety and convenience of the welder or spray painter. “Things like moving the hand during welding – you can’t watch a video and then learn, you have to practise it,” he says.

They realised that the core value they bring is in the hand movement angle. “So, all our tech has been around measuring the dexterity of the hand, comparing it with what is ideal, and then guiding the student to get to that ‘ideal’ in the shortest possible time. And for that we have used different technologies – earlier we had our own sensors, now we lean on the AR and VR devices,” Nair says. In 2015 and 2016, the company also raised funds from the Dell Foundation and Ankur Capital, an early-stage VC firm focused on deep-tech.

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