Recently, in Varanasi, children and elderly women were seen sitting with folded hands and peering intently into their VR headsets for a virtual darshan of the famous Kashi Vishwanath temple.
Harshit Shrivastava and his TechXR team are exploring the virtual world beyond gaming to develop immersive content for temples and other religious places around India.
“Two virtual reality devices are being used during the trial. On an average, 250 devotees get a virtual darshan of Baba Kashi Vishwanath daily,” said Shrivastava, in an interview with AIM.
God Comes Home
This feature isn’t new. In 2022, Shrivastava and his team first experimented with this technology at Ujjain’s Mahakaleshwar temple. “We set up three physical experience centres, replete with VR headsets, AR devices, and 3D-printed scale models of the sanctum sanctorum,” said Shrivastava.
Another startup company Tagbin’s pet project Temple 360 has integrated 36 temples on its virtual website. This allows people to visit these temples remotely and perform virtual darshan, prayers, and rituals online for any of the 36 temples covered on the platform.
Similarly, Experience Makkah, offers a similar experience, making yatris incapable of undertaking Hajj and Umrah on a virtual tour.
It uses 3D modelling to let users circle the Kaaba building, meet praying pilgrims dressed in white terry cloth garments, learn about the rituals and explore other significant landmarks. Experience Makkah’s latest version can be explored through Google Cardboard, a low-cost cardboard attachment that turns smartphones into virtual reality viewers.
Holy City, another VR application, gives a glimpse of Jerusalem’s Old City.
Saurav Bhaik, the founder and CEO of Tagbin, and his team have also developed a hologram of Shri Krishna. Devotees can ask about their life problems, and the hologram will answer based on verses from Bhagavad Gita.
“This speech-to-text and text-to-speech technology is a large language model trained on only Bhagwad Gita translations in English,” Bhaik said.
Such encounters are just one of the many emerging locations in the metaverse. In this immersive virtual world, individuals can connect via avatars, which have risen in popularity throughout the pandemic.
The metaverse pilgrimage tours aim to replicate the feel in a virtual world. Regardless of age or medical condition, you can efficiently perform darshan from the comfort of your home.
Limitations
While the experience might be immersive for devotees, the technology is expensive. Shrivastava had to import VR devices into India, with each device costing INR 1 lakh. That’s when he got the idea of augmenting VR into our smartphones.
“Through our Durlabh Darshan app, devotees can take live darshan. The subscription cost is as low as INR 2,500 per year,” he added.
Other startups, too, need to make it accessible to all.
“In the past, VR headsets were very bulky and of low quality, requiring phones to be inserted into basic viewers like Google Cardboard. However, now high-end headsets like Apple Vision Pro are lighter, more comfortable to wear for longer periods, and provide improved visual experiences,” said Bhaik.
Difficult To Scale
Apart from the cost, scaling VR into pilgrimage has another set of problems. VR headsets have no safety requirements in India.
“The lack of data sets specific to the Indian context leads to hallucinations in these tools. For example, one of the GenAI images of Goddess Saraswati had seven toes,” said Ajit Padmanabh, the founder & CEO of Who VR. His company is integrating VR into museums and temples.
The numbers support the claim. As of 2024, the VR market in India is $789 million. In contrast, the USA, which is the leading revenue generator in this market, has a projected volume of $10,900 million.
Needs Heavy Computing
One of the key advantages of virtual pilgrimage events is accessibility. When the coronavirus put a break on travel, Nimrod Shanit came up with the Holy City that gives a glimpse of Jerusalem’s Old City.
“In creating these 3D spaces, hundreds of thousands of photos were captured using extremely high-resolution cameras. The data footprint of this project exceeded 50 terabytes, and the computer power required to process it was immense,” said Shanit.
Is it really worth it?
Traditionalists dismiss the idea as analogous to converting a temple into a theme park or that these are simple gimmicks that do not stir spiritual energies. They raise the question: “How can one do a pilgrimage without doing a pilgrimage?”
However, Shrivastava disagrees. “The idea of introducing VR is to enhance the devotee’s experience, not replace it.”
Opportunities Galore
India’s spiritual sector is estimated to be worth between $30 billion and $40 billion. According to the tourism ministry, India’s religious tourism sector attracted 1,439 million tourists in 2022.
It is predicted to increase by 16% by 2030. The sector is expected to earn $59 billion in revenue by 2028 and provide 140 million temporary and permanent jobs by 2030. The need to augment technology is real.
“The tourism industry is starved of technology. India needs to be at the forefront of the metaverse. We cannot let our artisans and locals miss this bus the way our population missed the internet boom in the 2000s,” said Padmanabh.
