AniML, the French startup behind a new 3D capture app called Doly, wants to create a PhotoRoom of product videos, so to speak. If you're selling sneakers on an online marketplace or need to create Instagram ads for a direct-to-consumer item, Doly lets you generate 3D models on your phone and turn them into professional-looking product videos.
Video creation is notoriously difficult, but generating 3D models is even harder, which is why the AniML team is focused on simplifying the experience: they want to make 3D capture a mainstream technology, starting with packaging it into an iPhone app.
Here's how Doly's 3D capture works: Users point their phone camera at a product and physically move around it to capture it in 3D. Behind the scenes, the app takes still images and sends them to the cloud. AniML builds a reconstruction pipeline using something called Gaussian splatting to turn these images into realistic 3D models.
3D models are traditionally created using a collection of points in 3D space, 2D textures projected onto these surfaces, and lighting effects. Gaussian Splatting is an entirely new rendering pipeline that uses a pre-trained AI model to estimate a 3D point cloud from a set of 2D images.
“Our starting point was a technological discovery: AI was just coming into the 3D world, and so people at Facebook, and even more so at Google, were doing research and writing some pretty significant research papers on something called NeRF,” AniML co-founder and CEO Rémi Rousseau told TechCrunch. “This is a new paradigm where we leave it to machine learning to try and reconstruct 3D.”
“We're no longer working in polygon-based 3D, we're working in neural-based 3D,” he added.
Gaussian splatting is not exactly the same as NeRF, but as Rousseau says, it is a spinoff of a type of 3D modeling technique.
That's the technical part. After that, AniML focused on finding a use case that would capture users from day 1. As a tool for creating 3D models, e-commerce companies were the obvious choice.
What else does the app do? After capturing a 3D model, Doly users can browse a template library to choose a 3D scene to integrate the object into. This can be a simple 3D rotation on a plain background, or it can be more dramatic in terms of marketing direction, with the camera slowly approaching the object and switching between different angles.
If the customer is happy with the results, they can also purchase the video from the app and download it for use elsewhere.
Image credit: AniML
Rousseau previously founded two VR companies, including Mimesis, a startup that was acquired by Magic Leap in 2019. Co-founder Pierre Pontevia also has an interesting track record, having sold one company to 3D tools giant Autodesk and another to 3D content development platform Unity.
To date, AniML has raised $2 million, with the seed round being led by Adjacent. The startup is also part of AI Grant, a startup accelerator led by Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross. Kima Ventures and several angel investors have also invested, including Julien Chaumond of Hugging Face, Nicolas Steegman and François Lagunas, who previously founded Stupeflix, Alban Denoyel of Sketchfab fame, Bertrand Schmitt, Thibaud Elziere, and Vincent Nallatamby. We also heard that Bpifrance also funded part of this round.
It will be interesting to see whether big brands, second-hand resellers, and other e-commerce pros adopt 3D rendered videos for their upcoming campaigns and online listings, but we can already rejoice that thanks to artificial intelligence, we may no longer need professional video recording studios to create compelling product visuals.