Manasi Basak, Co-Founder & Sumeet Basak, Co-Founder
If there's one industry that has really caught up with the millennial generation, that is 'gaming'. As technology advances, it brings opportunities for game development studios to innovate. Augmented Reality has been one such technology that has thrown open the horizon for limitless possibilities in gaming. At the same time, Augmented Reality has also seen huge growth over the past few years amongst advertisers to create engaging experiential campaigns.

Consumers are more and more open to augmenting their world with useful content, information, and offers while establishing deep emotional connections with brands. In fact, the number of mobile AR users is predicted to reach 200 million by next year, which means we will surely be seeing much more advertising experiences powered by AR.

Imagine bringing the best of these worlds that is gaming, AR, and advertising, together to have an exhilarating product or brand experience!

“Imagine if one has a mobile augmented reality app that helps in shopping for furniture online. The user can move mobile across his/her room and place the sofa wherever required in real time"

Established in 2018, Ronin Labs is an ‘immersive interactive experience' company founded prominently along with the gaming domain. Given the decades of experience, the three founders (Sumeet Basak, Amit Basak and Manasi Basak) bring in from various walks of life, the firm soon realized the correlation with the advertising industry and the potential for it to be disrupted by proven game mechanics. Ronin Labs tapped the opportunities that lied ahead in terms of the gamified campaigns offered by businesses to their clients to engage them. Often while building games, one of the important things to be kept in mind is the reach. Once reached, the users are to be engaged and then gradually be converted into paid users. Ronin Labs, having worked in the gaming industry for quite long, applies these gaming principles to advertising & marketing to ensure the expected conversion is achieved for a particular campaign. Leveraging visual graphics and game mechanics, Ronin Labs attempts to engage and retain the users to eventually convert as per the brand's objectives.

Ronin Labs are a young & energetic team of professionals striving to deliver excellent user experiences through design and technology. The firm is essentially an amalgamation of two decades of rich experience in various industries like Gaming, IT, Advertising & E-learning. The core philosophy of the company has been to merge Creativity & Technology. Along those lines, from a service perspective, Ronin Labs offers Augmented Reality solutions to for Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and the mobile web. Clearly, Ronin Labs has established a worthy clientele with its exclusive approach to advertising & marketing. In fact, the company has been developing Facebook playable Ads for some premiere clients. Playable Ads are essentially small games or experiences that are targeted to the selected audience which helps brands to get their message through to the audience as to what services or offerings they have to offer without having to explain the entire brochure. Such gamified approaches have been the forte of Ronin Labs.

Ronin Labs are a young & energetic team of professionals striving to deliver excellent user experiences through design and technology

Industry First Unique Concepts Brought to Reality
The firm also does bespoke campaign design & development for major brands. One of the most popular smartphone brands that has gathered significant attention in India, leveraged Ronin Labs expertise to develop the world's first AR unboxing of one of their recent launches. When the client sought to come up with one of the most unique and 'cool' ways to launch their brand, Ronin Labs sat down to do extensive brainstorming to finally introduce the 'coolest' way to launch the new phone. Almost 94 million users across the globe accessed to experience what and how the new mobile phone looks like. This was a tremendous feat for Ronin Labs and the phone manufacturer. Likewise, Ronin Labs has developed custom made solutions right from games that run on browsers, or any microsite that is running immersive 3D content or IoT devices custom made for brands.

In another similar turnkey client venture, one of India's largest private banks wanted to promote the salient features of their personal banking app. Ronin Labs conceptualized and developed a Facebook Playable Ad that engages users educating them about the benefits of using the app. Users need to tap on respective app icons at the right moment to transact successfully. Multiple icons are thrown towards users, representing a unique type of transaction, e.g. electricity bills, recharge etc. The game play progresses to become challenging making it tougher to collect the icons, eventually merging the individual app icons into a single button representing the bank's inhouse app. On activating the button, users are shown multiple offers on 1st, 3rd and 5th transactions done using the said application. "We love to bask in the goodness of both functional design & technology and therefore pick work that fulfills our deep desire of doing awesome work," says Sumeet.

Imagine if one has a mobile augmented reality app that helps in shopping for furniture online. The user can move mobile across his/her room and place the sofa wherever required in realtime. For retail outlets, a customer can use their mobile augmented reality app to scan the products on the aisle and read its reviews, compare products and even receive extra discounts on the app. Now imagine if all that did not even require a mobile app. What if the entire technology is constructed within the retailer's online website, wherein all a customer needs to do is open the website and start experiencing. Ronin Labs did a similar project with the TV subsidiary of the mobile phone brand that sought its unboxing miracle. Ronin Labs with its expertise was able to enable the users to virtually place the TV in their living room driving their purchase decision. The size accuracy was 95 percent, giving users a real world experience.

Future Lies in Finding New Avenues & Ideas
Ronin Labs has demonstrated par excellence in terms of serving customers with their out-of-the-box solutions and concepts. Going forward the firm intends to continue doing the same venturing into new avenues not just in terms of service but also, products involving AR tools, IoT hardware and Crypto gaming.

As cryptos continue to be a global phenomenon, industries all around the world are looking for more ways to incorporate this frankly revolutionary technology into their core products and services. Online gaming, in particular, has become a breeding ground for exciting innovation in this space. Developers are inventing new methods to leverage cryptos to purchase and trade in game products, cosmetics, unlock characters, and much more. The convergence of the virtual and the real our metaverse has never looked so good. Crypto games are video games that run on a cryptocurrency network and include completely or partially distributed ledger architecture, providing players verifiable ownership over the virtual products contained in the games. Players other than having fun can also earn in crypto while playing games.

Ronin Labs realizes the potential of this future in gaming and therefore looks forward to further innovate, create and revolutionize how brands tell their stories.