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AniML<\/a>, the French startup behind a new 3D capture app called Doly<\/a>, wants to create the PhotoRoom<\/a> of product videos, sort of. If you\u2019re selling sneakers on an online marketplace or need to create Instagram ads for your direct-to-consumer wares, Doly helps you generate 3D models with your phone and turn them into professional-looking product videos.<\/p>\n While video creation is notoriously hard, generating a 3D model is even harder. That\u2019s why the AniML team has focused on simplifying the experience. They want to turn 3D capture into a mainstream technology, starting by packaging it into an iPhone app.<\/p>\n Here\u2019s how 3D capture with Doly works: The user points their phone camera at the product and physically moves around<\/a> 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<\/a> to turn these images into a realistic 3D model.<\/p>\n 3D models are traditionally created with a collection of points in 3D space, some 2D texture projected on top of these surfaces and lighting effects. Gaussian splatting is an entirely new rendering pipeline that involves estimating a 3D point cloud from a set of 2D images using a pre-trained AI model.<\/p>\n \u201cOur starting point was a technological finding: AI had just arrived in the 3D world. So people at Facebook, but even more at Google, were doing research and wrote a fairly important research paper on something called NeRF,\u201d AniML co-founder and CEO, R\u00e9mi Rousseau, told TechCrunch. \u201cIt\u2019s a new paradigm in which you try to reconstruct 3D by letting machine learning do the job.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cYou\u2019re no longer working in polygon-based 3D, but now you\u2019re in neural-based 3D,\u201d he added. <\/p>\n Gaussian splatting isn\u2019t exactly the same as NeRF, but it\u2019s a sort of descendant 3D modelling technology, as Rousseau tells it. <\/p>\n So that\u2019s the technical part. AniML then focused on finding a use case that could grab users from day one. E-commerce companies were the obvious choice for a creation tool for 3D models.<\/p>\n What else does the app offer? After capturing a 3D model, Doly users can browse a template library to choose a 3D scene for their object to be integrated into. This can be a simple 3D rotation with a plain background or something more dramatic, in terms of marketing staging, such as the camera slowly approaching the object and switching to different angles. <\/p>\n If a customer likes the result, they have the option to buy the video from the app and download it for use elsewhere.<\/p>\n Rousseau previously founded two VR companies \u2014 including Mimesys, a startup that was acquired by Magic Leap in 2019<\/a>. His co-founder Pierre Pontevia also has an interesting track record as he sold a company to the 3D tools giant Autodesk; and another to the 3D content development platform, Unity.<\/p>\n So far AniML has raised $2 million, with Adjacent<\/a> leading the seed round. The startup also participated in AI Grant<\/a>, the startup accelerator led by Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross.\u00a0Also investing are Kima Ventures and several angel investors, including Julien Chaumond from Hugging Face; Nicolas Steegman and Fran\u00e7ois Lagunas who previously founded Stupeflix; Alban Denoyel of Sketchfab fame; Bertrand Schmitt; Thibaud Elziere; and Vincent Nallatamby. We\u2019re also told Bpifrance contributed to a portion of this round with a grant.<\/p>\n It will 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\u2019s already nice to see that you might not need a professional video recording studio to create compelling product visuals thanks to artificial intelligence.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n