Fastening the typical kursi ki peti in the aircraft is so 2020. Proxgy, a new travel app, says you should be fastening the straps of a smart helmet that has a 360-degree rotatable camera mounted on top to travel virtually. After you decide you will be teleporting yourself to Bali islands, the app searches for Proxgies logged in for that region.
Once Proxgy accepts a user’s booking, they are linked in an instantaneous ride-hailing manner to his or her Proxgy via two-way audio, one-way video. The user can then see and listen live to what their Proxgy is seeing and hearing in the place of Proxgy’s service, while they sit at home and ask their Proxgy to perform the tasks of his/her choosing via audio commands relayed to the Proxgy through the service app.
“You won’t be able to feel the waves on your feet, but you can think of the experience as roaming the real world in the metaverse through your human avatar,” says Pulkit Ahuja, founder and CEO at Proxgy, a visual commerce platform that enables virtual travel with an immersive experience.
The camera access is controlled by the user via a multidirectional joystick control within the Proxgy user app, giving users a real-time immersive experience of the Proxgy’s surroundings. This enables immersiveness in a real-time human-assisted manner.
Headquartered in Gurugram and founded in 2020, Proxgy’s uses Live Assisted Commerce providing Everywhere as a Service (EaaSe). The app also lets users shop, travel, recce, research, visit real estate and virtually teleport themselves to any place of their choice at a moment’s notice.
Proxgy was launched last year during the Covid lockdown and has since then served more than one lakh users with an average engagement time of over 15 minutes across various verticals, including shopping, errands and inquiries, Ahuja says. The virtual travel experience of shops, showrooms, and other business locations where the business owner acts as a Proxgy is free for users.
The app has been working with event and location managers/owners as well to enable visits to their places. “In August 2021, we made Virtual Live Visits to an electric vehicle expo in New Delhi. We are in the process of enabling the same for a couple of international Smart Cities,” adds Ahuja.
A lot of such experiences could become a possibility in 2022.
How Proxgy works:
1) Proxgy works on a deep tech concept called 'Live Assisted Commerce providing Everywhere as a Service'
2) Users can book a Human Avatar or Live Assistant at a location of their choice in an Uber-like manner
3) The Live Assistant is equipped with their patented smart IoT device (Smart Helmet or Smart Cap) which provides the user with live, interactive and immersive access to that physical destination of their choice
4) Surfing real-time locations using the six-axis stabilised handsfree streaming technology enables users to have a wider physical footprint with an option to switch between 360 degree and 3D experience modes