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The AR Show: Kirin Sinha (Illumix) on Crafting Compelling Content & Experiences for AR | Otter.ai

The AR Show: Kirin Sinha (Illumix) on Crafting Compelling Content & Experiences for AR

Jason McDowall56min

Jason McDowall

00:03

Welcome to the AR show right dive deep into augmented reality with a focus on the technology, the use cases and the people behind them. I'm your host Jason McDowall. Today's conversation is with Kirin Sinha. Kirin is the co founder and CEO of Illumix a company building an AR first mobile gaming platform. You may be familiar with Illumix if you're a fan of the horror franchise Five Nights at Freddy's. The Illumix team has already found a lot of success with their first title Five Nights at Freddy's AR Special delivery.

Jason McDowall

00:33

Prior to founding Illumix, Kirin was the founder and executive director of shine for girls whose mission is to transform the lives of middle school girls, by cultivating a passion for mathematics through a program that incorporates both math and dance. Kirin has a BS in theoretical math and computer science from MIT, as well as three master's degrees spanning mathematics, machine learning in business from Cambridge, the London School of Economics in Stanford. In this conversation, Kirin shares how she thinks about creating compelling stories and gameplay for mobile devices where AR is a central component:

Kirin Sinha

01:05

Every other type of content that we've had to date, whether that's, you know, movies, website and app, you know, existing 3d games, even VR games, honestly, it's all built within its own world, you have this one to one relationship as a developer to consumer of, I'm going to put you through this flow or this experience. And you as a user are going to have exactly that. With AR that construct completely breaks down. I have no idea. If you're sitting at home, if you're in an office out in the field, I don't know what your environment is. And it deeply changes how you receive content. And so we felt very strongly from the beginning that in order to create valuable AR content that immersion had to come from content that in some ways adapted to its world, which meant that the way you have to think about content from a creation from a tools from a tech perspective all have to be fundamentally different.

Jason McDowall

01:54

We go on to talk about how the Five Nights at Freddy's franchise is a great fit for AR and also why the Illumix team needed to go beyond AR kit AR core and unity in order to deliver their vision for compelling AR first mobile experience. Kirin talks about her broader ambitions and also has some amazing advice for building and maintaining self confidence. Let's dive in.

Jason McDowall

02:17

Kirin, a lot of college students dream of spending a summer traveling around Europe. But yours is a different sort of experience. What was the motivation to spend a summer in a convent in Italy?

Kirin Sinha

02:28

Sure. So I spent after my freshman year of college, I went to a convent in the very northern part of Italy, in the mountains in a place called monado. And there are a bunch of different reasons I think this could have happened in part, I had actually not graduated high school I had gone off to kind of pursue professional dancing, got injured and then ended up going to college. So I felt actually that moment in my life, a little bit of an identity crisis, like I didn't quite have that same amount of clarity. I think one of the incredible things when you grow up and you have such a strong passion for something and for me that was dance is you almost feel like you have a career at a young age, there's incredible amount of focus in the sense of I know exactly what I'm doing. And by the time I got to college, I think like most students, I lost that I didn't have a sense of this is really what why I'm here and what I'm trying to do with this experience. And so I wanted to take a moment, almost a time out from my usual life and my own perspective and do something really, really different. And I was encouraged that, you know, summers of college are a good time to do that, instead of just purely internships and kind of building a resume. So I took advantage of that. And I've watched the sound of music and ungodly number of times, which I am convinced played some kind of mental role in this. And I went off and I did something completely different. And it was actually the most I think, formative experience of my life. It was the first time I was ever truly alone. And I mean truly alone if I tried to learn Italian prior to the summer, and had I actually paid attention and done a little bit more research, I realized I'm in a German speaking town, which so I completely couldn't communicate. I didn't understand. I mean, I have all these crazy stories of the doors being locked very early, which I had no idea because it all the signs were in German that alerted me. So I'm like climbing a tree I mean full sound of music style to try and get into my room at night and dropping in amidst a number of nuns doing some kind of prayer group outside just staring at me like who is this girl? They put me in the highest tower underneath the bell after that as punishment. So I would vibrate awake at 5am it was just so it was a wild summer, but I had an opportunity to just sit with myself and do a lot. I read a ton of books during that summer. And I think that was when I really became passionate about storytelling and thinking about what different worlds could exist in just a little distance from your own world and spending time in other people's worlds, I think actually gives you a really different idea of what could be around people or what kind kinds of experiences people have, or just the types of worlds that we could exist. And I think ultimately a lot of that passion translated into what what's now a Lumix of thinking about the world and looking at spaces and thinking, what kind of stories can I tell? I mean, that one little phrase, like, once upon a time is probably one of the most powerful phrases in the human language, I would argue,

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