The UXplore journey would not have been possible without the commitment and support of Carl Vaz, who stood behind the team from the earliest stages—well before there was a client, a proven market, or a clear commercial path.

When UXplore entered a completely new vertical in 2022, Carl ensured that production and the ground team in Trivandrum could continue moving forward. Coming out of the COVID period, when many businesses were struggling to restart, he made sure the team did not stop. His support created the continuity that allowed the technical vision to keep developing.

The team continued building toward a vision that ultimately evolved into what UXplore believes became the world's first AR/XR spatial marketplace anchored at physical locations.

To establish an initial commercial vertical, Carl focused on the team's strongest domain expertise—travel and tourism, working closely with Varghese Oommen. Carl's extensive international experience became instrumental in understanding how UXplore could be adapted to different markets, cultures, and business environments. Rather than treating UXplore as a single product for every market, he helped guide the team toward developing localised solutions based on regional needs.

Today, Carl leads UXplore's Go-to-Market strategy, market penetration, and regional partnerships, working with partners to identify local opportunities and shape solutions around the specific requirements of each market. He also leads investment enquiries and cross-border expansion initiatives alongside Varghese Oommen.

The combined strengths of Carl and Varghese have enabled UXplore to move beyond being simply an AR/XR technology company. Their work is helping position UXplore as a solution provider that connects technology, businesses, places, and communities in ways that were previously not possible through conventional AR/XR platforms.

Looking Ahead

As UXplore moves toward the transition to smart glasses and the growing role of AI, Carl and the wider UXplore team will leverage their international and regional networks to expand UXplore initially as a freemium product, building a strong user and content ecosystem before scaling commercial opportunities.

With the upcoming Chat with UXplore AI, Carl is helping position UXplore to deliver a customer-first solution, beginning with the travel and tourism market, where understanding the customer and having the right content are fundamental. The vision is simple: the customer is king, and content is king.

By bringing together UXplore's technology, upcoming AI capabilities, location intelligence, content, and Carl's international market network, the next phase is focused on making UXplore accessible to a much larger audience—creating the foundation for growth as the world moves from mobile experiences toward AI-powered, spatial and wearable computing.

Varghese Oommen plays a key role in shaping UXplore's enterprise solutions and cross-border expansion, working closely with Carl Vaz as a powerful business duo. Together, they bring international market experience and a strong understanding of travel, tourism, and local business ecosystems to UXplore.

Their approach begins with a focused principle: solve for niche areas and specific locations first. UXplore enables businesses, artisans, enterprises, creators, and local service providers to gain visibility in and around the very locations where their customers are already present—something that was previously difficult to achieve through conventional AR/XR technology.

Varghese is particularly focused on understanding the needs of the local artisan, enterprise, and creator who can easily become lost in the sea of digital visibility. Instead of competing for attention across massive online platforms, UXplore creates an opportunity for these businesses and creators to become discoverable where their stories, products, services, and physical locations actually matter.

The future potential is even greater. With the evolution toward AR glasses, spatial computing, AI-powered experiences, and location-based interaction, the concept of virtual booths, stalls, and rooms can become a natural part of the physical world. UXplore is building the foundation for that future while using the technology available today to create meaningful connections one location at a time.

Varghese's niche-focused approach is about building the ecosystem location by location. A local artisan, a heritage site, a restaurant, a hotel, a creator, or an enterprise can become part of a larger spatial network. Their stories can then connect from place to place, allowing travellers to better understand where they are, what makes that place unique, and what is available around them.

As people travel, UXplore can help them embrace local culture while simultaneously directing foot traffic toward the businesses, creators, services, and experiences located at that point of interest. This creates a cycle where discovery generates visibility, visibility generates engagement, and engagement strengthens the local ecosystem.

Varghese's vision is therefore not simply to put businesses on another digital platform. It is to bring digital discovery into the physical world, giving communities and enterprises a new way to be found, understood, and experienced—one location, one story, and one ecosystem at a time.

Together with Carl Vaz, Varghese is helping build the commercial and enterprise foundation for UXplore's next phase: from location-based AR today, toward intelligent spatial booths, stalls, rooms, and AI-powered experiences tomorrow.

Varghese has a strong network of key decision makers across various Industry verticals.

Joshua Ninan Oommen is the Founder and CTO of UXplore Technologies, where he leads the product vision, technology direction and development of UXplore's location-based AR/XR platform.

His research into location-based broadcasting and contextual digital experiences began in 2014, while working across technology projects in Malaysia and Singapore. Joshua explored how location could make digital content, products and services more visible to people in the places where they were relevant. He worked with location APIs, including the Foursquare API, to develop more localised approaches to location broadcasting.

The Personal Beginning

There is also a personal story behind Joshua's long-standing interest in location and virtual experiences.

Having lived in Malaysia since 2006, Joshua experienced periods when visa limitations made it difficult to travel to many places he wanted to see. With Google as his main resource for exploring places he could not physically reach, he began imagining a virtual map of the world — one where he could explore places and leave messages, information and recommendations for friends and colleagues around the world.

This evolved into an early idea of a “Virtual Wall” in cafes and public venues, where people could exchange ideas, products, services and messages both physically and digitally. Joshua imagined physical and digital meetings taking place together through holographic, immersive and eventually metaverse environments.

For Joshua, location was never simply about finding a place on a map. It was about connecting people to what exists at that place — and allowing people elsewhere to participate.

From Location Broadcasting to AR/XR

His technology career gave him experience across both the commercial and technical sides of this vision. As a Regional Music Consultant with Shazam Entertainment in London, Regional Account Manager with App La Carte (now PUTTI Apps), and through subcontracting projects with Nokia Asia, Joshua worked across music technology, mobile applications, retail, hospitality and digital platforms.

These experiences shaped his vision of giving greater visibility to artists, smaller brands, SMEs and enterprises, whose products and content can easily become buried within platforms such as Google and YouTube.

In 2017, before leaving Malaysia, Joshua and his OliveApps colleague Galveston Fernando developed and filed the intellectual property concept for an AR/XR model with MyIPO, the Intellectual Property Corporation of Malaysia.

The concept explored the progression from AR to smart wearables, incorporating text, voice, audio recognition and mapping to create location-aware experiences.

Location-Based Wi-Fi

In 2018, Joshua was brought in to supervise the installation and deployment of managed Wi-Fi services associated with RailWire/RailTel, including a project connected with the Member of Parliament Local Area Development Scheme for Dr. Shashi Tharoor in Kerala.

The project explored location-based Wi-Fi broadcasting. The wider programme was later affected by the Kerala floods and could not continue as planned.

Building UXplore

During the 2020 COVID period, Joshua returned to his AR/XR vision and began looking for a way to build the technology from India.

With experience in C++, software project supervision, DevOps, technology sales and product development, he began working with a lean technical team, guiding engineers and subcontractors through the development process.

This eventually led to UXplore's location-based AR marketplace, bringing together location, mapping, content, commerce and immersive experiences, with AI now being added to the platform.

Joshua's role has been to bridge vision and implementation — defining the technology direction, breaking requirements into practical development tasks, supervising engineering and production workflows, and driving a lean Agile approach with limited resources.

Creators, Content & Travel

One of the areas Joshua is particularly proud of is UXplore Cuts, its YouTube and collaboration layer, connecting videos to locations around the world.

His personal attachment to content and music creators is central to the UXplore vision. He believes creators should be able to deploy customised content, products and experiences at specific locations and gain visibility from people who are actually there — rather than competing only for attention on global platforms.

Joshua now sees UXplore developing into a technology that can work “like clockwork” within the travel ecosystem — connecting airports, transport hubs, hotels, attractions, restaurants, retail and destinations with the relevant businesses, services, products, creators and experiences around them.

The original desire to virtually explore places he could not reach has therefore evolved into a broader vision: helping people discover what is around them while giving businesses and creators visibility at the places where they matter.

Joshua Ninan — Songwriter, Composer & Singer

Joshua's connection to the creative industry is also personal. He is a songwriter, composer and singer, working under the artist name J Ninan.

His experience as a musician has influenced his thinking around creator visibility and the challenges faced by independent and niche artists.

His work has included Mumbaikar, released through Times Music, where he co-composed and contributed writing and music to the film's soundtrack/background music for the OTT production directed by Santhosh Sivan.

Joshua also spends time informally mentoring startups and technology teams, particularly those working with limited resources, using a lean and Agile approach to help solve production and technology challenges.

At the heart of Joshua's work is a simple idea: if people are already somewhere, technology should make the most relevant content, products, services and experiences visible to them there. UXplore is his attempt to build that missing layer between the physical and digital worlds — making location an active part of how people travel, discover, communicate, create and experience the world.

UXplore began its immersive journey with Unity, starting the development of its location-aware augmented reality platform. Building on this work, Abin Mathews Benny, an Electronics Engineer by education and a full-stack developer at UXplore, contributes expertise across hardware, software, graphics, cloud technologies and immersive computing.

From the early stages of UXplore, Abin worked on the technical development of the product under the guidance and direction of Joshua Ninan Oommen, whose experience in location-based broadcasting came from his work with Shazam Entertainment London in SEAP, PuttiApps NZ and Nokia Asia Singapore subcontracting projects.

Joshua provided the domain knowledge, product vision and direction for bringing location, content and technology together, while Abin began developing and implementing the technical work required to turn that vision into a working product.

Abin's expertise includes Unity, Kotlin, ARKit, ARCore, Firebase, cloud technologies, GPU computation and cross-platform development.

His Electronics Engineering background also gives him experience across hardware, devices, sensors, cameras, graphics processing, GPU computation and on-device computing. This combination of software and hardware knowledge supports UXplore as it continues to explore AR, immersive computing and AI-enabled experiences.