Metaverse magic: Gamitronics' PartyNite is where pixels meet possibility
what if you could step through the digital wormhole into worlds where imagination bends reality? Dive into Gamitronics, Rajat Ojha’s portal to India’s metaverse, where you can experience real-time avatar adventures, apart from engineering, exploring, and trading in blockchain-powered universes. This Hyderabad-based gaming and metaverse company has VR, AI, and interactive ecosystems at its core, transforming pixels into living, breathing galaxies. Founder and CEO Rajat Ojha explains the ABCs of his metaverse creation in an insightful conversation with CE.
Take us through your journey to founding Gamitronics.
I have always been a ‘builder’. Even as a child, I used to make my own toys rather than buy them. I had a huge fleet of army figures with tanks, soldiers and even underwater boats and ships. Then my brother and I built our own two-floor house on our terrace using alum, wood, and so on. This was when I fell in love with building… not necessarily with technology, but using machines, physics and electronics.
When I got my hands on the Atari ZX2600, a home video game console, I used to look at it more than play on it. I could control pixels on the TV, and all of this filled me with excitement for technology. I decided that this was what I was going to do for the rest of my life.
I started working on AI and telecommunications integration with games at companies like IBM, Toshiba and Motorola, where we built AI tech stacks and cross-platform game architectures as early as 1999. In 2006, I joined Zen Technologies, which played the most significant role in shaping my career. There, I not only led technology and successfully deployed processes, but also worked across various streams within the organisation. This experience helped me look beyond technology, to view everything through the lens of products with the company at the centre — an outlook that continues to shape Gamitronics.
Introduce us to Gamitronics.
Gamitronics has been a pioneering company from the start. We never believed in doing what already existed, and always focused on what was coming next. Simply put, we are a metaverse and gaming company. For the uninitiated, metaverse is a 3D immersive world driven by a creators’ economy — people can live, socialise, buy, make money, and so on. In general, a metaverse has a Web3 layer, which is a blockchain or crypto layer.
In the early days of Gamitronics, we worked on some of the biggest IPs (intellectual properties) in the world, like Resident Evil and Battlefield, adapting them for location-based entertainment centres. I’ve always had a strong belief in 3D. Born in an era when even images on the internet were a big deal, I knew it was only a matter of time before people became comfortable experiencing the internet in 3D. So, my team and I built PartyNite, a 3D experiential immersive space where you can shop, meet people, hang out, watch movies, attend events and more. We launched PartyNite on January 26, 2022, with a Daler Mehndi concert that went viral. As we started to grow, we were hosted on The Kapil Sharma Show, Kaun Banega Crorepati, and even at the Cannes Film Festival. We currently have 157 million users.
Inside PartyNite, we also have ARCade Land, a mission to educate the younger generation about sustainability goals by making them experience it first-hand. Let’s take an example where we talk about life under water — we allow kids to virtually fill the sea with plastic, petroleum and garbage. We then give them a timeline to observe the impact five years from now, 20 years from now, and 100 years from now… the results are usually pretty overwhelming for them, triggering them to take action. It is a multiplayer architecture (consider it like PUBG but for greater good) so kids can invite their schools, friends and team up to take action on the platform itself and see how their small deeds have a large impact. It’s the most profound and a fail-safe environment where kids can experiment and learn what happens if we don’t take action now.
Mark Zuckerberg’s metaverse wasn’t a hit. Why do you think that is?
When Zuckerberg launched his metaverse, the focus was heavily on VR devices such as Oculus Quest. That created a significant barrier: most people do not want to buy an expensive new gadget merely to ‘enter’ the metaverse. Instead of being inclusive, it became exclusive.
The metaverse, by definition, should be expansive, safe, and universally accessible. Yet VR adoption was already limited, and betting on the metaverse to drive headset sales ignored history: no device has ever achieved mass adoption purely because of hype, without first having strong, established use cases. Price was another obstacle; if ChatGPT had been launched at £399 (₹46,838) rather than being widely accessible at the outset, uptake would have collapsed.
That is where our platform is different. We have built a metaverse without entry barriers. Whether you are on mobile, PC, Mac, browser, smart TV, or indeed VR, you can access it. One universe, every device. The metaverse should belong to everyone. Come and experience it with us.
Collaborations with entities like Microsoft and ISRO have been significant. How have these partnerships influenced Gamitronics’ growth and technological capabilities?
When ISRO, alongside the Telangana government, launched the SpaceTech policy, we were the chosen platform to support it. It was an incredibly immersive experience, with live speeches and interactions followed by the policy launch. The launch itself was spectacular — a rocket took off, deployed a probe, which then opened up to reveal the policy. Having a gamified avatar of former ISRO chairman S Somanath on our platform was a proud moment.
We repeated this during the launch of Chandrayaan-3, allowing our users to experience what goes into a launch. From the countdown to the moment of touching the lunar surface, we ran a campaign highlighting the complexities involved. Users could interact with like-minded individuals, engage with experts and be part of the journey. The countdown was conducted by Somanath himself.
With Microsoft, the greater challenge was to communicate the company’s values to its partners, who were familiar with the products but less so with the values. We recreated Microsoft’s headquarters, allowing visitors to explore, engage and then meet the general manager. As they walked and talked with him, the values were subtly integrated into the experience, effectively becoming part of the system.
What specific AI technologies are employed, and how do they enhance the user experience?
We have our own AI called Brahamand, which, though not natively developed, leverages existing APIs to enable ease of creation on the platform. Users can take a photo of themselves and instantly convert it into a playable avatar. People can take photos of objects, which are converted into 3D and immediately become playable assets. Users can also provide a prompt to create any kind of event, and Brahamand builds it in a jiffy, with flexibility to customise anything. This provides a seamless, limitless experience with endless possibilities.
We use this for something we call ‘3DCommerce’, where users can set up shops simply by taking photographs of their products and providing relevant details. An AI avatar is then trained to know the products, interact with users, make suggestions, and display items in 3D.
You’ve described PartyNite as ‘India ka apna metaverse’. How do you plan to differentiate it from global platforms like Roblox or Decentraland?
While Decentraland is a decentralised economy-first platform, we are an experience-first company. And while Roblox heavily caters to younger audiences, we target the teen and above segment. Also, Roblox has no Web3 component, whereas PartyNite is built around Web3.
One key distinction from the others is that we’re not selling land; we’re selling built-up structures, which are much easier to understand and relate to. We saw success with this approach because, as Indians, we prefer things we can see and feel.
Blockchain integration in PartyNite is complex. How do you ensure secure, fast, and low-cost NFT transactions in a high-traffic environment? How do you protect users from potential fraud or scams?
PartyNite uses an L2-first, AA-powered stack with audited contracts, creator verification, and real-time risk controls. This ensures sub-second, low-cost NFT actions, while actively blocking scams, copy-mints, and phishing at the source. We place a lot of importance on AI use cases in detecting and preventing fraud. We also use AI-powered KYC to maintain a secure and trustworthy platform.
Real-time rendering, physics simulations, and large-scale concurrency are major technical challenges in the metaverse. Can you share how PartyNite tackles these behind-the-scenes complexities?
We have a long history of developing multiplayer games and have been using the Unreal Engine, a real-time game engine, since 2002, which makes this fairly seamless for us. We offload heavy computations to optimised game servers, synchronise state through low-latency protocols, and use smart load balancing to ensure hundreds of thousands of concurrent users enjoy seamless, real-time interactions.
You’ve mentioned that the metaverse will serve as the operating system for Gen Alpha. What developments are necessary to realise this vision?
Patience. We’re seeing the pattern already. We’re expanding from India into the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the EU; it’s steady, deliberate growth. If you look at how we’ve moved from text-only browsers to rich 3D experiences, this shift is inevitable. The rise of Roblox and in-game advertising are clear indicators: An average Gen Alpha user spends two to three hours on Roblox compared to 1.5 hours on YouTube and 38 minutes on Netflix. With 89 million daily active users on Roblox and that level of engagement, the signs are already here.
Road ahead for Gamitronics.
We have created a world for Saudi Electricity where their employees can learn to drive safely, as well as a training environment for building scaffolding that is safer to use and sturdy enough to support real-world conditions.
We’ve formed a promising partnership with ZainTech, one of the largest system integrators in the Middle East, and we’re entering a collaboration with one of the biggest companies in Sweden, though we cannot talk about it just yet.
Our partnership with ZainTech is focused on developing various use cases of PartyNite. Our solutions are showcased at their experience centre, where visitors can explore how we can help. For instance, one of the largest yacht companies discovered our solutions there, and we are now working with ZainTech to formalise how our technology can help their employees sell, fit and repair yachts, and also allow end users to experience different yacht models through realistic physics simulations.
We’re also finalising our integration of the Common Sense Machines into the core of Brahamand for 2D-to-3D conversion. CSM, as it’s commonly known, is a leading AI company that enables the creation of 3D models simply by using photographs. We are integrating this into our tool so users can upload photographs of their products, possessions, or themselves, and convert them into 3D models for use in PartyNite.
Additionally, we’re rolling out a Software Development Kit (SDK) that allows any Android game to run within PartyNite. This will bring a wide range of games to our platform and enable Web3 features for any game.
Curiosity kills the cat — what does a metaverse look like 50 years from now?
The word metaverse will eventually disappear — just like AC is no longer written on cars, or how no one refers to Snapchat filters as computer vision. Similarly, the metaverse will become an integral part of our daily lives. Smart glasses are making it more accessible and scalable.
The way we consume information is going to become extremely personalised. We might both look at the same billboard on the road, but what you see and what I see could be completely different, depending on our individual patterns. Product information will appear as an overlay; we’ll see the world through a camera, and voice will become our default input. The metaverse is the ocean, and we are the surfers. On its wave, the world turns experiential and hyper-personalised. And reality will be re-written for each of us.