Dharmin Vora started out as a food blogger, but soon felt that one aspect of the dine-in restaurant experience needed to be expanded into something more. And that was the menu, which hadn’t really evolved over the years, especially for dine-ins. That’s the problem his two-year-old startup Peer—which he co-founded with his brother Parth Vora and his batchmate Pritesh Mehta—hopes to solve by allowing dine-in customers to get restaurant menus in 3D and Augmented. Has been doing. reality form.
“You read a paper-based menu and you imagine something and then you order. But food is something that is very visual and this strategy doesn’t always work. Sometimes customers get disappointed about the quantity, the way the dish looks,” added Vora indianexpress.com,
With Peer, customers can see nearby restaurants that are implementing this new form of menu and order from the app inside the restaurant. In restaurants, they can scan a QR code to view the menu in 3D AR format. The app lets users see the rating of each dish instead of the rating for the restaurant. But the main difference Peer is focusing on is that the menu can be accessed as a 3D model.
Users can zoom in and out to find out exactly what they’re getting when they order, instead of getting frustrated with looks or even quantity.
To be clear, Peer’s focus on the dine-in experience is now booming again COVID-19 Restrictions have been lifted in most cities and more people have started moving out.
The way Vohra sees it, while food delivery has seen a lot of customization, the same has not happened with dine-in and he is confident of trying to fill the gap. The Mumbai-based company has managed to onboard around 500 restaurants, most of them in the capital of Maharashtra. They expanded to Delhi this October and added around 50-60 restaurants on the platform.
The AR engine and 3D software are proprietary and took about a year and a half to build. Peer has also used some open-source tools and Google Use AR for best results.
“The main difference is the 3D models, which are less than a MB. We have reduced them and kept at the same quality, fine, almost the same level of HD image quality,” said Vohra, thus loading these menus on most phones. made easy to do.
And when the lockdown scuttled his plans, once dine-in was allowed, Vohra said restaurants started reaching out to him. “First month (October 2020), we placed barely 500 orders with 1000 installs, and then saw tremendous growth only by word of mouth,” he claims, after the second lockdown is lifted in Mumbai, he received around 200-250 calls. Receive new menus from existing restaurants on the possibility.
Dharmin Vora, PeAR’s co-founder.
By March 2021, just before the second wave arrived, they had grown to 5000 orders per month and had 200 restaurants on board. In October this year, the app has received over 10,000 orders and has crossed a modest 30,000 app installs.
In Vohra’s view, Covid has indeed proved to be a blessing as it has forced restaurants to adopt digital and accelerated technology. The app currently has about 300 restaurants on waiting lists as it attempts to scale up.
And what does it take for a restaurant to come on board? While Peer charges a commission of around 5 to 10 percent for orders on the app, restaurants populate the app with short videos of dishes. Peer converts the video into a 3D model.
But converting the menu to 3D is time consuming and takes time and server bandwidth to train the data set. It also explains why not all restaurants that have signed up with the app have yet to implement 3D menus, as are many smaller, family-owned restaurants.
But isn’t there a challenge from the big players implementing the same idea? Vohra is more confident here again, hoping he can offer his tech solution to the big guys in the future. “We see them as collaborators rather than competitors. They have consistently tried to solve just for delivery. But we have also seen user adoption, which shows that the product is a market fit,” he said. .
,