Inclusivision began with a report I helped write on accessibility in Delhi’s monuments. These sites are supposed to belong to everyone, yet the design often decides otherwise. I kept seeing the same barriers. Stairs with no ramps. Uneven paths that turn a short walk into a struggle. Signboards placed where only some bodies can read them easily. It wasn’t one dramatic failure. It was a pattern.
That work changed how I looked at heritage. I grew up around these monuments, so I treated them like background. Then I started noticing who was missing. People with disabilities. Students who cannot afford trips. Kids for whom distance makes these places feel permanently out of reach. The exclusion had become normal, which made it easy to ignore.
I’m a computer science student, so my next instinct was to build. I brainstormed ways to combine what I knew with the problem I was seeing. Photos felt flat. A standard video still keeps you outside, watching. I wanted presence for students who are underprivileged or differently abled. VR was the first idea that made access feel redesignable.
It also had to be low-cost. Schools and NGOs cannot rely on expensive headsets. So the goal became phone-based VR, similar to Google Cardboard, done at scale.
Development took time and forced me to learn quickly. I picked up Unity from scratch and went through four prototypes. Early versions could only play a 360-degree video in a frame, and the illusion broke fast. Head tracking became non-negotiable. Eventually, I figured out how to use the phone’s native gyroscope sensor to track head motion. That changed everything. You moved your head and the world moved with you.
Testing exposed issues I hadn’t expected. Depth was one of them. I realized I needed the same video to play on the left and right halves of the screen to simulate stereoscopic vision. Implementing it cleanly took more iteration than I want to admit, but it made the experience feel believable instead of gimmicky.
A moment from those trials still stays with me. I watched a student “stand” inside the Taj Mahal through the headset. His awe was immediate and visceral. He wasn’t reacting to a screen. He was reacting to a place.
Finishing the app was only half the journey. Implementation was harder. I wanted to reach as many children as possible, so I approached schools, NGOs, and government institutions instead of marketing Inclusivision for individual use.
A turning point came when the Directorate of Education in Gurugram invited me to speak to a gathering of over 500 school principals and introduce the app.
That event revealed a distribution problem. Even if principals liked the idea, how would they get headsets? Many institutions hesitated to spend on an untested program, even with cheap Google Cardboard-style headsets. I realized I had to supply headsets myself if I wanted adoption.
That meant funding. I reached out to MapMyIndia because our visions aligned. They map India so people can navigate it. Inclusivision helps students experience India when physical access fails. MapMyIndia supported the project with close to three lakh in funding, which let me donate headsets at scale.
From there, the project grew rapidly. I began partnering with NGOs such as Amar Jyoti Charitable Trust, Peepul Foundation, and Teach For India.
The most significant support came from the Ministry of Education in Delhi. The Honorable Minister of Education, Shri Ashish Sood, allowed me to present Inclusivision across schools in Delhi and supported efforts to bring it into learning contexts. That partnership mattered because it moved Inclusivision from “a good initiative” to something that could live inside a system.
Inclusivision’s content has always mattered as much as the tech. I recorded audio guides myself for each location, so students aren’t just dropped into a 360-degree scene. I added obscure facts rooted in mythology and lost stories, details that don’t show up in a quick search. I also built a podcast series with people in Indian culture and heritage, including Ms. Anoothi Vishal and Mr. Anubhav Nath, so students can hear expertise connected to the places they are exploring.
Today, Inclusivision is used in over 700 schools and 37 NGOs, reaching nearly 100,000 students, including around 10,000 specially abled learners. The work is still moving. Schools are being added as the project scales pan-India. I’m also still building new features, including an AI-powered chatbot, autoplay for smoother sessions, and new locations.
Inclusivision taught me that accessibility is more than infrastructure. It’s a design decision. And design decisions can be changed.
By Neil Chaudhary