AniML, the French startup behind a brand new 3D capture app called Doly, desires to create the PhotoRoom of product videos, type of. If you happen to’re selling sneakers on an internet marketplace or have to create Instagram ads to your direct-to-consumer wares, Doly helps you generate 3D models along with your phone and switch them into professional-looking product videos.
While video creation is notoriously hard, generating a 3D model is even harder. That’s why the AniML team has focused on simplifying the experience. They need to turn 3D capture right into a mainstream technology, starting by packaging it into an iPhone app.
Here’s how 3D capture with Doly works: The user points their phone camera on the product and physically moves around it to capture it in 3D. Behind the scenes, the app grabs still images and sends them to the cloud. AniML has built a reconstruction pipeline using something called Gaussian splatting to show these images into a practical 3D model.
3D models are traditionally created with a set of points in 3D space, some 2D texture projected on top of those surfaces and lighting effects. Gaussian splatting is a completely recent rendering pipeline that involves estimating a 3D point cloud from a set of 2D images using a pre-trained AI model.
“Our start line was a technological finding: AI had just arrived within the 3D world. So people at Facebook, but much more at Google, were doing research and wrote a reasonably necessary research paper on something called NeRF,” AniML co-founder and CEO, Rémi Rousseau, told TechCrunch. “It’s a brand new paradigm during which you are attempting to reconstruct 3D by letting machine learning do the job.”
“You’re not working in polygon-based 3D, but now you’re in neural-based 3D,” he added.
Gaussian splatting isn’t the exact same as NeRF, but it surely’s a type of descendant 3D modelling technology, as Rousseau tells it.
In order that’s the technical part. AniML then focused on finding a use case that might grab users from day one. E-commerce firms were the plain selection for a creation tool for 3D models.
What else does the app offer? After capturing a 3D model, Doly users can browse a template library to decide on a 3D scene for his or her object to be integrated into. This generally is a easy 3D rotation with a plain background or something more dramatic, by way of marketing staging, similar to the camera slowly approaching the item and switching to different angles.
If a customer likes the result, they’ve the choice to purchase the video from the app and download it to be used elsewhere.
Rousseau previously founded two VR firms — including Mimesys, a startup that was acquired by Magic Leap in 2019. His co-founder Pierre Pontevia also has an interesting track record as he sold an organization to the 3D tools giant Autodesk; and one other to the 3D content development platform, Unity.
To date AniML has raised $2 million, with Adjoining leading the seed round. The startup also participated in AI Grant, the startup accelerator led by Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross. Also investing are Kima Ventures and several other angel investors, including Julien Chaumond from Hugging Face; Nicolas Steegman and François Lagunas who previously founded Stupeflix; Alban Denoyel of Sketchfab fame; Bertrand Schmitt; Thibaud Elziere; and Vincent Nallatamby. We’re also told Bpifrance contributed to a portion of this round with a grant.
It’ll be interesting to see whether big brands, second-hand resellers and other e-commerce professionals embrace 3D rendered videos for upcoming campaigns and online listings. But it surely’s already nice to see that you simply may not need knowledgeable video recording studio to create compelling product visuals because of artificial intelligence.
