Rainbow: My journey of innovation

It all started three years back when I was participating for Codeproject's Intel Ultrabook App challenge. It was for the first time a great touch laptop loaded with tons of sensors and beast of processing power was introduced by Intel. I have never been a great fan of smart phones or tablets. One of the reasons is that I love power and they lack it. If you have ever taken a ride on Bullet, would you be comfortable with Hero Honda ever/

So I thought here is a cool device to do some cool stuff. I have been in Education service industry for over a decade by then. I had also had some good successful products for targeted SMEs. In fact I created one of the first accounting software that runs purely from paindrive, had a purely steganographed image as database. More than 10k copies of that software is sold.

But Ultrabook gave me a way to try my luck into consumer products. Being a fan of Image Processing, I built a good image processing software called Image Grassy. And I still continue to use it because it offers me something that other apps doesn't. I reached finals of that challenge but was grossly a learning experience more than anything else.
Intel had the AppUp centre which was taking Desktop apps. I dedicated quite a bit of time to publish desktop apps. But then it abruptly closed the AppUp, leading to a complete waste of time and effort. But it wasn't in true sense.

I got another opportunity when Intel launched first Creative 3D camera and announced Perceptual computing challenge phase I. I again went all out ( I would explain the term all out in later part of this blog for your better understanding).

I did some 20 apps with Perceptual Computing SDK in a month. You could check my extensive work with PerC in my youtube playlist here:
Intel RealSense And Perceptual Computing Work - YouTube

This time, it wasn't as bad in terms of returns as I managed to win three 2nd prizes in that contest. That gave me lot of confidence, though a first prize still eluded me.

Next year I participated PerC challenge phase 2. I created two apps namely
Shadow Art Showmaker


and
Perceptual ImageGrassy


To me, Shadow Art Showmaker was a lifetime experience. I bet my life, business, career, family life and every possible thing I had in that contest. I had written a detailed CE blog about that. I can't find the link now ( or, perhaps I am just too lazy to search my old blogs).
But, I was disappointed with the results. I couldn't manage to even got a second prize this time around.

I thought both the apps were much ahead of their time. The processing capabilities of the PCs back then were not good enough for supporting such graphics. But none the less, the failure was so demoralizing that I could not lift myself for days ( lie, in fact for months).

Just after the contest we had one more contest called Intel App Challenge II and here too I was in the finals. Here I created Augmented world which was a one heck of everything app, combining Shadow Artshowmaker, Augmented world. But it too did not finish in result round.

It was about the same time that I told myself that I am possibly not good with consumer products and I promised myself to never try making another so called "app" in my life. I went back to teaching and doing projects for SMEs, students, offering simulation and prototyping services.

Then Intel came up with RealSense challenge in late 2014. I told myself that I am not going to waste my time in it ever again. But my wife Moumita inspired me to give it one more go. This was about the same time I had my PhD course work papers. having not written the first attempt due to my psychological breakdown after consequent failures, I had the one chance of making it in PhD exams. So I casually submitted some seven proposals and to my surprise six of them got selected for finals. Shadow Artist was one of them.

This time I decided, that I would do it little differently. Rather than adding features, I spent time on reducing features and worked significantly on user experience. I submitted three aps in early demo submission and all three won early demo awards. A cool 3K USD was good motivation. I had my exams from 19th to 26th January 2015 and final submission of RealSense was just a week later. So packed off as much of development possible by jan 5th and gave myself a solid two weeks to slog with subjects. Thankfully I managed to clear all the course works in a single go. And I did it with a little bit of my own style. I realized I can never reproduce the text books with this pathetic preparations, so I practiced the block diagrams and other concepts and in exams literally represented everything with mathematics. Looks like evaluators are not that comfortable downgrading anyone whose answerpaper is full, and is full with Integrations and equations.

Back to the submission and I managed to submit four apps on the day of submission. I frankly wasn't expecting anything this time.
It also came true. But, Intel awarded me with a Trailblazer award and a cool 10k USD prize money. A not so frustrating experience none the less.
And I knew that my stint as a product based company was almost over. I knew Intel had no plans to come up with any significant contests in any sooner.

But then Intel was promoting IoT and I really got hooked up with IoT. Did attend it's IoT Pune roadshow, and started working with Intel Edison. I made a cool project for my son, to control RC cars with the mobile.


This did not have any commercial aspects and was a hobby stuff. But one thing I saw was that my son was loving it and was playing with it. So was great for me.

In the month of July ( 2015) one day I got contacted by an Intel developer manager by name Mr. Praveen Ramamurthy. He asked me "Intel would like to have Shadow Artist demo in it's site. would you be interested?"
Hell, yes. Why shouldn't I? I had worked on this project for last two years. So I started making the process much smoother. I had a real tester at home. My four year old Son Rupansh would make some movies with it. But he would repeatedly tell me "baba, why this doesn't have colors?"

His lack of interest in the product gave me something to think about. I realized that when you create a product, that must solve a problem. And my biggest problem was my son's approach of learning. He would ask many questions. Once you say, Apple starts with A. He would keep asking "why it starts with A, why it is red? why we don't play with it? Why we eat it". I would then not manage to go to B. He also loves animation. So I though may be I could teach him something with animation. But my primary objective was to create an easy animation tool.
So I created a nice animation tool called Rainbow.


Why Rainbow? Because it had what Rupansh always wanted in ShadowArtist! Color.
Once he started playing with Rainbow, I realized kids love animation. They simply do. And when you give them some power of making, they love it even more.

I asked myself, can I give him something that could help him with his queries? Can I built an education app? But then there were plenty of education apps around. So first I started giving him some of the popular education apps like the ones from xlkids and ABCYA. He played for couple of days and then he would never turn to them. Within a week I realized that he wasn't interested in Rainbow too. His behaviour had a significant impact on my though process. I realized even learning is like toys for them. They really want new stuff. So rainbow had to be in a way to organize the knowledge and be more like toys.

I coded extensively for about two weeks and changed the whole App. I organized the animations as Chapters. So that he can learn one thing at a time.
Here is a screenshot of it's early version.



Now I wanted a customer validation. So I went to different schools, gave them demo. In every school they liked the idea. They had certain concerns and I noted them down. In most schools I visited they thought such a product could be addictive to kids. I had to convince them.

One of the issues that I observed with Rainbow was that my son would complain that I can not win anything here. I observed the reason kids love games is that they can actually win something. So I created a quiz engine, game engine and whole lot of new thing. My idea was to create something that gives users an easy access to creating their own content for teaching their kids. Keeping the interface same for every type of learning was essential.
I created :
1) Match the pair
2) Rough Quiz
3) Odd thing out
4) Sorting
5) Smart Chart
and many such activities.
I also realized that my son learns faster and better when I explain the meaning of something in Bengali ( our mother tongue). So I incorporated Localization support. Without changing UI, you can teach the kid in as many languages as you wish.

One of the great thing about this product is that entire logic is encoded into image file names. Just with different file name patterns one can create a learning chapter for kids. Today if a good teacher wants to share his knowledge with the world, he has to write an App. A primary teacher may not be good at creating an app as apps demands a different user UI and experience. But images? Anyone can create image and change file names. So I worked towards creating this engine that can handle images, decode the coded information into file names and do amazing stuff.

I kept pivoting Rainbow and wanted to release it in Dipawali ( 2015) which was few days back at the time of writing the blog.

I realized that everyone will not have a multi touch laptop and a Windows 10. There are many Windows 7 happy users. So I worked towards making the app reverse compatible with windows 7 and be as good a user experience as with touch. Finally after about 20 days of sleepless nights, no participation in regular business activities and a cut off family life,

I now had to create a product video which went with the theme of the product. All my earlier product videos were how to use them. But with Rainbow I tried to explain why and what and not how.
Here is the final product video.


With Rainbow, I am on a mission to make my own kid more smarter. I am a mission to solve my own pain and solution. But I want everyone to enjoy teaching their kid. So I have uploaded the beta for free.

So, if you have a kid or just curious as to how can education be made smarter, you can download the app for free from:
#-Link-Snipped-#
I am getting several requests a day for an Android version. I would keep it in wrap for couple of months. I want to understand how Rainbow can be made better, how can we put different education activities into it, how can it be more creator friendly and user friendly. Once we have enough data, we will launch the Tablet version of it.

I wrote this blog to let you know that no effort of your's is wasted. It took two years for me to create Shadow Artist and two weeks for Rainbow. That's because I had these two years of failures to tell me what I must not do. At the end, I would be happy even if few kids become as privileged as Rupansh to have their fun learning with Rainbow.

Do leave your comments and thoughts.