He headed the Computer Vision and Virtual Reality groups of CAIR and was instrumental in initiating several VR applications for DRDO and the defence.

He moved to IIIT-Hyderabad in 2000 and established the Centre for Visual Information Technology (CVIT), which has grown into the largest research group in India in the areas of computer vision, graphics, and medical image processing.

Prof. Narayanan has played crucial roles in several editions of the Indian Conference on Computer Vision, Graphics, and Image Processing (ICVGIP).

In computer vision his early work on 3D recovery of dynamic scenes through virtualized reality has resulted in tremendous growth in 3D capture to be available to end users.

He pioneered the use of innovative platforms like the GPU for common computer vision applications such as graph cuts, neural networks, clustering etc.