New Delhi: Meta in late November announced it is supporting industry body FICCI with $1 million for the XR Open Source (XROS) fellowship programme that will help 100 Indian developers working on XR (extended reality) technologies for the future of metaverse. Run by FICCI, the XROS programme will provide developers fellowships which include stipend and mentoring. The National e-Governance Division, an initiative of the Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology (MeitY), will be the technical partner to the programme.

“The metaverse won’t be built by one company alone. Through programmes like XR Open Source, we will support Indian developers working on these exciting technologies,” said Nick Clegg, President, Global Affairs, Meta. The programme will lay the foundation for India-specific solutions that are affordable, appropriate and localised to regional languages.

The XR Open Source programme is the second one in India through which, Meta aims to boost the developer ecosystem around immersive technologies and will further the open ecosystem for building the metaverse. Meta earlier supported and launched various open source initiatives such as No Language Left Behind (NLLB), a single multilingual AI model which supports 200 low resource languages, including 25 Indian languages.

The XROS programme is part of Meta’s global XR Programmes and Research Fund under which the company announced a $2 million fund for the XR Startup programme, with MeitY Startup Hub earlier this year. “The vision for India’s techade can only be achieved when the young developers and start-ups, including those from tier 2 and 3 cities, contribute to enabling future technologies like XR in the metaverse,” said professor Ajay Kumar Sood, Principal Scientific Adviser to the government.

“The programme will provide the necessary impetus towards fueling the growth of investments in future technologies in line with the government’s vision for making India a trillion-dollar economy by 2025,” said Devin Narang, FICCI Committee Member and Country Head-India, Sindicatum Renewable Energy.

In 2021, Meta partnered with the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) to bring immersive technologies to over 10 million students and 1 million educators over the next three years.