Bengaluru-based Byju’s to get access to Osmo tech

Osmo was founded by former Google developers Jerome Scholler and Pramod Sharma, that is specialised in taking care of computer vision for innovating blended learning games for children. While this startup will be able to modify and leverage Byju’s content, the Bengaluru-based firm will get access to Osmo’s tech smarts. Tencent-backed online learning platform Byju is looking forward to leverage Osmo, the Silicon Valley startup that it freshly obtained for $120 million, to frame the capabilities in technologies such as computer vision and artificial intelligence, that has been left behind in the past before the coming.

“Byju’s DNA is predominantly offline (and content), and even today a bulk of their distribution remains offline. Osmo will help the company develop a tech lens in the product offering,” an investor in the company marked anonymously. Computer vision is an interdisciplinary scientific field in which computers are trained to extract, analyse and understand digital images or videos, with the intent of replicating towards human tendencies and ideologies to perform. “Osmo is an award-winning game system that will change the way your child interacts with the iPad and iPhone by opening them up to hands-on play,” claims the website, introducing the latest remarkable technology to develop and understand the better world. Osmo also specialises in using computer vision for formulating blended learning games for kids.

“In the future, books could be an input. It won’t just be for students in lower grades, but also for those in class 8 or 10, where we combine offline and online instances to create a blended learning tool. It will be a new category, which we will end up creating over time,” claimed Raveendran, founder of Byju. While the companies have by this time revealed their first jointly rated product, that would demand the stage of kindergarten to grade three students, Byju Raveendran, stated that there will be more initiatives. He also hopes, in the near future, that Osmo’s technology can be formed into a platform and integrated into all of Byju’s learning programmes.

Osmo’s technology can presently detect shapes, numbers, letters and even images of characters and objects in relatively real-time, but going ahead it says this capability will grow and develop increasingly well. “Imagine a biology classroom where students get step-by-step instructions on how to dissect a frog from a software that is watching their every move,” marked Osmo founder Sharma. “Machine vision is the number one focus, but we also have patents on a lot of the interactions. We have many other ideas for similar form factors and we will continue to innovate on this because that’s the only way we feel we can build a barrier from being disrupted,” added Sharma, in a conversation with ET.

The startup, he claimed, will increasingly develop in refining its machine vision tools and will sum up to more members to its team to fasten the development of advanced capabilities. Upto date, Osmo’s software is only trained to recognise pre-programmed images, but in the upcoming future, it could make sense of something it is seeing for the first time and run up applicable content for the student.