AniMLthe French startup behind a new 3D shooting app called Dollywants to create it PhotoRoom product videos, sort of. If you sell sneakers on an online marketplace or want to create Instagram ads for direct-to-consumer products, Doly helps you create 3D models with your phone and turn them into professional-looking product videos.
While creating a video is very difficult, creating a 3D model is even more difficult. That’s why the AniML team has focused on simplifying the experience. They want to turn 3D shooting into a mainstream technology, starting with packaging it into an iPhone app.
Here’s how 3D shooting with Doly works: The user points their phone’s camera at the product and physically moves to capture it in 3D. Behind the scenes, the app captures still images and sends them to the cloud. AniML has built a reconstruction pipeline using something called Gaussian splatting to turn these images into a realistic 3D model.
3D models are traditionally created with a collection of points in 3D space, some 2D texture projected over those 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.
“Our starting point was a technological breakthrough: artificial intelligence had just arrived in the 3D world. So people at Facebook, but even more so at Google, did 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 by letting machine learning do the work.”
“You’re no longer working in polygon-based 3D, but now you’re in neural-based 3D,” he added.
Gaussian splatting is not exactly the same as NeRF, but it is a kind of 3D modeling technology, as Rousseau says.
So this is 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 3D modeling tool.
What else does the app offer? After downloading a 3D model, Doly users can browse a library of templates to select a 3D scene to embed their object into. This can be a simple 3D rotation with a plain background, or something more dramatic in terms of marketing props, such as the camera slowly zooming in on the subject and changing to different angles.
If a customer likes the result, they have the option to purchase the video from the app and download it for use elsewhere.
Rousseau previously founded two VR companies — 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 a company to 3D tools giant Autodesk. and another on the 3D content development platform, Unity.
So far AniML has raised $2 million, with Neighboring driving the round seed. The startup also participated AI grant, the startup accelerator led by Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross. Kima Ventures and several angel investors are also investing, 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 that Bpifrance contributed a portion of this round with a grant.
It will be interesting to see if big brands, second-hand resellers and other e-commerce professionals embrace 3D video for upcoming campaigns and online listings. But it’s already nice to see that you may not need a professional video recording studio to create compelling product graphics thanks to artificial intelligence.
