Kirin Sinha ’14 remembers the very first time she worked with augmented reality (AR) as a student at MIT. With a buddy and fellow engineer, she constructed the Ironman desk—a pc technique and AI technologies that makes use of holographic projections controlled by hand movements and voice commands. Today, she is the founder and CEO of Illumix, a technologies and media corporation that develops immersive AR experiences for mobile phones, internet websites, and social platforms. 
Sinha’s vision for the corporation is expansive—“to build a platform that would enable infinite experiences to exist,” she says. “We think it is going to be the next version of the internet, and it’s really going to change how we look at and engage with every piece of information in the future.” 
When she founded the corporation in 2017, she and her group chose an market that was currently familiar with AR: gaming. In November 2019, Illumix launched Five Nights at Freddy’s, a mobile app in which customers invest additional than 70% of their time in AR. Within a day, the game organically gained additional than 30,000 customers and hit quantity two in Apple’s app retailer, and it reached additional than 1 million customers inside a month. Today, the game has additional than 35 million downloads. 
“Literally the first night that the game was on the app store it went viral, and it was terrifying and exhilarating all at the same time,” she says, laughing. “It gave us incredible validation of the vision of what these interactions and what the future of entertainment—and I think even the world more broadly—might look like.”
Since the initial accomplishment of the game, the corporation has expanded into giving AR tools for e-commerce, with offerings like virtual clothes attempt-ons. “I think we’re going to look back and realize how inefficient the process for purchasing things was—basically ordering lots of things, hoping something looks good, and then sending it back,” she says.
Beyond altering the way we consume or attempt on garments, Sinha says, the technologies could also transform digital engagement on a bigger scale. “Think about how much time we spend in front of our screens and in our digital world, and how different our presence in the digital world is from our real life,” she says. 
“It was clear to me that at some point the world would have to move in this direction, away from a passive digital world. And if that’s the case, then an underlying technology company powering this content would become one of the most relevant and important companies of the future. And that’s what I wanted to build.”
