CHENNAI: Imagine standing on your friend’s palm and singing a duet in celebrity-style voice. We’re not talking about the distant future. You can live this experience on your smartphone now by making your own 3D avatar with the TaDa Time app, and communicate exactly what you think using features besides text, or stickers.
A product of AugRay, this is an augmented reality (AR) messaging and social media app for Android and iOS, started by Suresh Thankavel, a tech enthusiast with an entrepreneurial mind. “I got this idea while reading a bedtime story to my son who wanted to not just see the characters in the book come alive, but be a part of them,” he says.
The idea took shape in 2014 when Suresh filed a patent to make user 3D avatars a part of stories. In 2017, TaDa Time was launched as a beta release, and has been undergoing changes and user testings since then. He says, “To use the app, you don’t have to be an actor or a singer; your digital avatar is one already. It can talk, sing, and dance for you.”
Reaching this milestone of success was an uphill task. Suresh along with his friend and the principle architect of TaDa Time, Swaminathan A, decided to create flagship apps for marketing and branding solutions. This was his first shot at creating augmented reality products, and the challenge was to come up with features exciting enough for users to keep coming back to them. When he realised that 3D objects were more interesting to developers than video overlays, he scrapped base codes written over months. This was also when he was juggling two jobs, and then lost his full-time job for being caught up in his own company’s venture.
Four years after these turbulent days, the few million dollars self-funded project, turned into a company with a `100 crore revenue. Suresh credits TaDa Time’s USP for this massive growth. “It’s personalised and imaginative. The user 3D avatar creation is instant with a voice, fun animations, AR messaging, and is a social media platform in itself,” he declares.
Presently, the app releases two features every month, but they’re planning to have more released in the future. It will also soon open itself up to the developer community to provide users with hyper-local content. “The goal is to make a difference in the augmented reality world. We will serve customers and businesses directly, with diverse yet specific features — all under one platform.”
To Sum Up
● Tada Time was started in 2013 by Suresh and Swaminathan A
● What started as a self-funded project turned into a company that brings in a revenue of I 100 crore
● They found that clients preferred 3D objects to normal video overlays