AniMLthe French startup behind a latest 3D capture app called Completedesires to create Photo room product videos, kind of. If you sell sneakers on an online marketplace or wish to create Instagram ads for your direct-to-consumer goods, Doly may help you generate 3D models with your phone and turn them into professional-looking product videos.
While creating videos is extremely difficult, generating a 3D model is even harder. That’s why the AniML team focused on simplifying the experience. They wish to turn 3D capture into a mainstream technology, starting by packaging it in an iPhone app.
Here’s how 3D capture with Doly works: the user points the phone’s camera at the i product physically moves it to capture it in 3D. Behind the scenes, the app captures still images and sends them to the cloud. AniML built a reconstruction pipeline using something called Gaussian splashes to rework these images into a realistic 3D model.
3D models are traditionally created from a collection of points in 3D space, some 2D textures projected onto these surfaces, and lighting effects. Gaussian Splashing is an entirely latest rendering process that estimates a 3D point cloud from a set of 2D images using a pre-trained AI model.
“Our starting point was a technological discovery: artificial intelligence had just appeared in the 3D world. So people at Facebook, but even more so at Google, did some research and wrote a pretty important research paper on something called NeRF,” AniML co-founder and CEO Rémi Rousseau told TechCrunch. “It’s a new paradigm where you try to reconstruct 3D and let machine learning do the job.”
“You’re no longer working in polygon-based 3D, but now you’re working in neuron-based 3D,” he added.
Gaussian splattering is not exactly the same as NeRF, but it is a sort of 3D modeling technology that is derived from 3D modeling technology, as Rousseau says.
This is the technical part. AniML then focused on finding a use case that might attract users from day one. The obvious alternative for a 3D model creation tool were e-commerce firms.
What else does the app offer? Once the 3D model is captured, Doly users can browse the template library to pick out the 3D scene they wish to integrate their object with. This may very well be a easy 3D rotation with a plain background, or something more dramatic in terms of selling staging, resembling a camera slowly moving closer to an object and switching between different angles.
If the customer likes the result, they can buy the video in the app and download it for use elsewhere.
Rousseau has previously founded two VR firms — including Mimesys, a startup acquired by Magic Leap in 2019. His co-founder Pierre Pontevia also has an interesting track record, having sold the company to 3D tools giant Autodesk; and the other for the 3D content creation platform, Unity.
To date, AniML has raised $2 million Adjacent leads the seeding round. The startup also took part in it AI grant, a startup accelerator run by Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross. Kima Ventures and several angel investors are also investing, including Hugging Face’s Julien Chaumond; Nicolas Steegman and François Lagunas, who previously founded Stupeflix; Alban Denoyel from Sketchfab; Bertrand Schmitt; Thibaud Elziere; and Vincent Nallatamby. We were also told that Bpifrance supported a part of this round in the type of a grant.
It will likely be interesting to see whether big brands, used equipment retailers and other e-commerce professionals use rendered 3D videos in their upcoming online campaigns and offers. But it’s already nice to see that you may not need a skilled video recording studio to create attractive product visuals because of artificial intelligence.