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About six years ago, Netflix dropped the most unimaginable episode of its Black Mirror series–Bandersnatch–in which a young programmer loses his grip on reality while building a video game. The episode allows users to choose their own adventure by letting them make decisions for the main character. Thus, the storyline is shaped based on the choices they make.

Now imagine stepping into a crime scene as a detective, going through the victim’s phone to uncover clues, and making decisions that drive the investigation ahead. AyeVee Interactive and Gamified Experience, a next-generation content platform, lets you do this and more. 

Working on similar lines as Bandersnatch, the AI-powered platform offers immersive 360-degree AR/VR (augmented reality/virtual reality) experiences, all while you watch a short film. 

The platform has been launched by Chennai-based mediatech firm Asiaville, co-founded by Tuhin Menon and Sashi Kumar, a prominent Indian journalist who established the Asian College of Journalism in Chennai.

Asiaville is renowned for producing digital media content for YouTube and has over 160 million users in Tamil and Malayalam. Its studio division has created several longform content pieces for Hotstar, focusing on regional series. In 2022, Asiaville and Spotify partnered to launch an initiative ‘Create with Anchor’ to support Tamil and Malayalam content creators. 

Now, through AyeVee Interactive and Gamified Experience, Asiaville is offering interactive films which let viewers actively make choices to steer the narrative of the story. 

Originally a regional content platform, AyeVee pivoted to offering immersive AR/VR experiences for users. The inspiration for the platform came from a live streaming session held last year. AyeVee’s team live streamed a murder mystery to engage with the audience. A scene was enacted, clues were provided, and the audience was asked to solve the mystery.  

This event, Menon says, demonstrated a high level of audience engagement and interaction, prompting the team to explore 360-degree interactive storytelling. 

Gamifying user experience 

AyeVee’s interactive platform–available as a mobile app–features two immersive single-user game shows: Who Killed Kavitha?, a detective thriller, and Let me out, an escape feature film. 

The shows are essentially videos that allow viewers to interact with the content. Users can click within the video for a particular action to occur. They can also interact with specific elements within the video to access additional information, which appears in the form of text or images. 

Users can browse through the scene and collect clues that lead to solving the mystery. 

For example, in Who Killed Kavitha, users can scroll through the victim’s phone–the interface is designed in such a way that it feels as though you are actually accessing someone’s phone in reality.

“It gives you an immediate feel of being there at the crime scene (an office space). Users can scroll through the victim’s phone to get a better sense of who she was and figure out who the potential suspects are while building their case,” says Menon.  

Who Killed Kavitha? begins with a narrative featuring real actors. As the film progresses, users get to play mini games that help solve the case. They can also chat with the forensic team and other characters in the shows, such as friends and family of the victim and other potential suspects. 

The information available to users varies according to the choices they make. The decisions made at different points determine the clues they collect, ultimately aiding in solving the case.

Users are offered a panoramic view of the space; they can move around and look at the space in its entirety. 

“We filmed every part of the entire crime scene extensively, ensuring complete coverage. The challenge was to meticulously capture every nook and cranny, and stitch it all together during editing. This was done using our in-house cameras,” explains Menon, who is an alumnus of New York University. He has sufficient experience working with major global media houses such as BBC and Walt Disney Company.

In the other show Let Me Out–which is similar to Squid Games–four friends find themselves trapped in a game box. 

Each character has a different narrative, and the content changes based on the character the user chooses to follow. The objective of this survival drama is to help the user’s on-screen avatar escape from the mysterious game box by solving puzzles, following the instructions of the game master. 

AyeVee’s mobile app is available on both iOS and Android platforms, and the games are streaming in Tamil and Malayalam, with English subtitles. There are plans to add more languages soon. 

“We are positioned between the gaming cohort and the entertainment core, trying to sort of get both those worlds together,” says Menon. 

Tech behind the scenes

Developed using Unity, the AyeVee platform integrates live-action content with interactive features and mini games, including fingerprint comparison, handwriting analysis, and text decryption. 

Unity is a widely-used game development platform and engine developed by Unity Technologies, a video game software development company based in San Francisco. It provides a set of tools and features for creating 2D and 3D games.

AyeVee has also used React, a framework used to build user interfaces for web applications, and ready-to-use AR and VR technologies to provide a 360-degree user experience. 

Growth and future plans

The platform’s revenue comes from microtransactions within the shows, wherein users can purchase exclusive content such as bonus episodes, an enhanced version of the show, special features, and alternative storylines. A premium subscription is on the anvil. 

Under the B2B channel, AyeVee creates customised solutions for brands. The company is in talks with a large jewellery brand in Chennai to create interactive solutions for its retail showroom, including an immersive VR experience wherein users can try out jewellery. It also plans to offer interactive solutions to a major Indian FMCG brand and an automobile maker in the near future. 

Launched on May 17 this year, AyeVee has recorded an upsurge in user engagement metrics. 

“Users are spending an average of 50 minutes per day on the app. Over 40% of our users are completing both shows in one session, indicating that the novel format is what is hooking users more than anything. Cumulatively, over 1 million minutes of both games have been played,” says Menon. 

Asiaville has raised $3.25 million in funding to date (seed + pre-Series A) from angel investors, and is in the process of raising more. 

Going ahead, the company plans to use AI for language dubbing and create more AI-generated shows using services such as Sora–an AI model that can create realistic and imaginative scenes from text instructions.

“AI will be an incredibly strong driver, if we are to scale, both in terms of quality and quantity,” says Menon.  

The AyeVee team wants to create an ongoing interactive experience for users. 

“Currently, we have shows with finite endings, but we want to create a series of stories with interactive options, always available on the app’s home feed. These stories will use audio, images, and videos and provide a continuous, engaging experience,” says Menon.