POCO India unveils POCO M4 Pro 5G in a never seen before launch event

POCO, India’s 3rd largest online smartphone brand, unveiled its first smartphone of 2022, POCO M4 Pro 5G on 15th February. Just like its brand new offering, POCO stepped up the saga of virtual launch events with its unique approach. The #NotAMetaverseLaunch was hosted by the animated avatars of POCO India leadership, Anuj Sharma, Country Director; Raghav Chitra, Marketing Lead; and Mrigank Bhowmick, Product Marketing Lead.

Catering to a tech savvy generation, consumers today are aware of different formats and are inclined towards expressing themselves in unique ways right from emojis to game avatars to cosplay, among others. Thus, with consumers wanting an ever-evolving experience, POCO India designed an event with an aim to resonate more with them and fuse together pop culture with spectacular technological innovations. The nuances of the launch included usage of a popular gaming engine - Unreal Engine 5 - to create a virtual world, using Blender and Facewire live to create over 52 blend shapes for mapping and syncing facial expressions and lip movements, using Nvidia’s Audio2Face along with an Xsenns motion capture suit to lip sync and capture the virtual skeleton.

The POCO M4 Pro 5G launch event was a step ahead in the direction of better engagement, innovation, and being relevant for the audience. The first of its kind in the history of launch events, POCO’s approach was executed by the team at Spacebot.

Commenting on the launch, Raghav Chitra, Marketing Lead, POCO India, said, “At POCO, we are all ‘Made of MAD’. Being a technology forward brand, we strive to empower consumers with innovation at not just product level but unique ways of engagement with the community. We cater to an audience who is fun, high spirited, and keeping up with the ongoing trends. And just like us, POCO fans are tech enthusiasts too, thus, abiding by an innovative approach, we extended it across this touchpoint too by using cutting edge technology to harp on a new concept. With POCO M4 Pro 5G being a kickstart to our 2022 journey, we strived to raise the bar high with the very first launch.”

He further added, “Honestly, the thought of pulling off a high-tech launch like this is time consuming and much risky given a deep integration of complex technologies and processes such as motion capture, a gaming engine, 3D software programming etc. but we believe it was a risk taken worthwhile. We believe we learn something new each day and this launch gave us the motivation to do better and bigger, not just as a brand but for our consumers.”

Sumesh Nayadi, Director, Spacebot, added, “Our team lives and breathes on creative strides. So, when we got an opportunity to curate the launch event of POCO M4 Pro 5G, we ensured no stone was left unturned in making it look mad, just like the brand. In today’s time, we are living in a technologically advanced world, so why not leverage that to the best. Thus, with a crisp and clear brief from the POCO team, we were able to bring the leadership’s animated avatars into action. It is great to see POCO pushing the envelope and doing things out of the box.”