Doly allows you to generate 3D product videos from your iPhone

AniMLthe French startup behind a new 3D capture app called Dolywild Photo room of product videos, sort of. If you sell sneakers on an online marketplace or need to create Instagram ads for your direct-to-consumer items, Doly helps you generate 3D models with your phone and turn them into professional-looking product videos.

While creating videos is notoriously difficult, generating a 3D model is even more difficult. That’s why the AniML team focused on simplifying the experience. They want to make 3D recording a mainstream technology, starting by packaging it in an iPhone app.

This is how 3D recording works with Doly: The user points their phone’s camera at the product and physically moves to capture it in 3D. Behind the scenes, the app takes still images and sends them to the cloud. AniML has built a reconstruction pipeline using something called Gaussian splashes to convert these images into a realistic 3D model.

3D models are traditionally created with a collection of points in 3D space, some of the 2D texture projected onto these surfaces, and lighting effects. Gaussian splatting is a brand new rendering pipeline 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: AI 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 JS. “It’s a new paradigm in which you try to reconstruct 3D by letting machine learning do the work.”

“You no longer work in polygon-based 3D, but now you work in neural 3D,” he added.

Gaussian splatting is not exactly the same as NeRF, but it is a kind of derivative 3D modeling technology, as Rousseau explains.

So that’s the technical part. AniML then focused on finding a use case that could engage users from day one. E-commerce companies were the obvious choice for a 3D model creation tool.

What else does the app offer? After capturing a 3D model, Doly users can browse a template library to choose a 3D scene into which their object should be integrated. This could 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.

If a customer likes the result, they have the option to purchase the video through 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. Its co-founder Pierre Pontevia also has an interesting track record as he sold a company to 3D tools giant Autodesk; and another for 3D content development platform Unity.

To date, AniML has raised $2 million with Adjacent leading the seed round. The startup also participated AI grant, the startup accelerator led by Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross. Also investing are Kima Ventures and several angel investors, including Julien Chaumond of Hugging Face; Nicolas Steegman and François Lagunas who previously founded Stupeflix; Alban Denoyel, known from Sketchfab; Bertrand Schmitt; Thibaud Elziere; and Vincent Nallatamby. We’re also told that Bpifrance contributed to part of this round with a grant.

It will be interesting to see if major brands, secondhand resellers, and other ecommerce professionals embrace 3D rendered videos for upcoming campaigns and online listings. But it’s nice to see that thanks to artificial intelligence, you may not need a professional video recording studio to create compelling product images.