It all started when Apple announced Body Tracking as a part of ARKit 3.0 at WWDC 2019. It was such an amazing demo and for someone who was used to Body Tracking using Mo Caps ( Remember seeing the stunt actors with a lot of dots on their body ? ), the ability to recreate that using just the Mobile camera was mind blowing.

I had an iPhone X at that time and had to come home to use Raksha’s iPhone XR that supported it. The API and the demo that come with that was as fascinating as the technology.

We had just started Parjanya Creative Solutions at that point and were looking to create a portfolio product for the company. Having several years of experience working in the Interactive Media space ( NextVR, StudioGPU ), we wanted our first product to showcase this technology. We decided to go for an app that uses Body Tracking, is written entirely in SwiftUI and uses some of the latest technology available. You go all in with the new and unproven technology when you start a new company right? :) The plan was to release this when iOS 13 ships. We had about 4 months of development time to get an app designed and running.

While we were pondering on what would be the best application to showcase the technology, thanks to our in house iOT engineer, Chandana Deshpande, who is also an expert in Yoga and whose entire family is dedicated and devoted to Yoga, suggested that we use this technology to understand the Yoga postures better. We did some PoCs and voila, ‘PRAYOGA’ was born. Prayoga means an ‘experiment’ in our native language Kannada. This was very apt since we wanted to showcase and experiment with the technology and wanted to work on Yoga.

Everything about Yoga is in holding the final posture. It is also about how you get to that state but the essence is in the practitioner being able to hold on to the final pose. This worked brilliantly for us since the body tracking and evaluation of that pose works best when the subject is still. We used this to our advantage and created a POC that we could show around and get feedback. The concept was simple

Pick an asana ( Pose ) to get better at.
Place the camera on a horizontal surface and walk away facing the back camera.
Follow the audio instructions and perform the asana
When you are done with the asana, hold onto the final pose while the app performs an evaluation based on the tracked body parts to compare against the “master pose” and give you a score.
We can tell you exactly and at what joint you went wrong and you can try it again to get better.

This process seemed simple enough for us to proceed developing the app further.

Being based in Bangalore, helped us with a lot of things. The access to Yoga instructors to be able to talk to them about each asana, go to yoga studios, learn how they teach and design this app according to that was immensely helpful. Thanks to Dr. Sudheer Deshpande ( Ex-SVYASA Director ) & Mr. Jagadeesh (Our advisor on all things with Yoga ) we were able to design a very efficient program based approach to Prayoga.

Another thing that really worked for us was having access to Apple App accelerator program. I had met Ashok Prabhu, Evangelist in the Bangalore App Accelerator, at WWDC and had explained him the concept. He was intrigued and had asked me to meet him at the accelerator when I had a working demo. I met all the evangelists there and when I presented my idea and the app to them, they wanted to learn more and offered to help in whatever way they can. They have been immensely helpful in designing all parts of the app. We even had private and one on one meetings with their lead UX Evangelist, Aniket, who has been such a great help in designing this app. I also met with Anuj Desai who helped us from the business perspective, making sure that we are connected with the right people at Apple and otherwise. This program really helped a small company like Parjanya by giving us a platform to reach out for help when needed. We had access to engineers when we had technical issues and were able to get feedback very quickly on some of the features we planned to develop. Very grateful for this association and hope more devs use this facility.

Months went by and we got busy in between working on a client project which I will discuss in the next blog and we pushed the release date for Prayoga. We kept experimenting, added new features, tried various designs and finally with the help of two amazing developers and WWDC Scholars, Rudrank Riyam and Pawanpreet Singh ( who worked on the UI for the app ) we pulled it off. We had a lot of help from our intern Ananya Desai on designing all the beautiful illustrations. We had an app that we felt good about and were in a place to ship the product.

We had a lot of fun working on the app along the way. We not only used the body tracking for evaluation, we built our own rig using Structure sensor scanners to create a 3D model of the instructor and used it within Reality Convertor and Reality Composer to be able to see the instructor in an AR environment. We used Native Puppets to help us with cleaning the produced models. I will talk about this technology in a separate blog.

We had extensive production shoots that I always wanted to be a part of for the 2D instructional videos. We hired a very able Yoga practitioner and a model Ms.Anushree Padmanabha for the shoots. We had a very creative team from Girnar Studios do the lighting and camera work for us.

March 2020, we had the product ready to be launched. We had a fair amount of internal testing done, had a roadmap ahead of us for the product and then COVID 19 hit. We had to move our launch plans to make sure all of our team were not stressed out and made sure they all were OK before the app launch. In the meanwhile we decided to add subscriptions to the app and get it future proof.

We know this app isn’t fool proof. There are times when Body Tracking fails, there are cases where we cannot evaluate the pose correctly. We knew these limitations when we started the app but we wanted to use the technology and keep getting better at it. We have a lot of things planned for the app and the solution that comes out of this. Prayoga v 1.0 is just the start for a long journey for the company in using this technology.

I will write more detailed blogs about each component in the app but wanted to share the journey so far. This has been so exciting for that we cannot wait for each one of you to try and play with the app. Please give us your feedback. We will strive to make this better. We will keep adding more asanas as soon as we can go out and shoot. We will make the evaluation a lot better. But for now, its time to showcase the product we have been working for the last 8 months.

Introducing “PRAYOGA” : App Store LINK

One page summary : PDF

Thanks,

Krishnaprasad Jagadish

Head of Mobile Engineering

Parjanya Creative Solutions.

Introducing Prayoga

Yoga and Immunity