I’m so pleased & even proud (having at least having offered my encouragement to him over the years) to see my buddy Bilawal spreading his wings and spreading the good word about AI-powered creativity.

Check out his quick thoughts on “Channel-surfing realities layered on top of the real world,” “3D screenshots for the real world,” and more:

Favorite quote 😉:

“All they need to do is have a creative vision, and a Nack for working in concert with these AI models”—beautifully said, my friend! 🙏😜. pic.twitter.com/f6oUNSQXul

— John Nack (@jnack) September 1, 2023

Pretty cool!

Here’s an example made from a quick capture I did of my friend (nothing special, but amazing what one can get simply by walking in a circle while recording video):

Karen X. Cheng, back with another 3D/AI banger:

As luck (?) would have it, the commercial dropped on the third anniversary of my former teammate Jon Barron & collaborators bringing NeRFs into existence:

Heh—before the holidays get past us entirely, check out this novel approach to 3D motion capture from the always entertaining Kevin Parry:

[Via Victoria Nece]

This stuff—creating 3D neural models from simple video captures—continues to blow my mind. First up is Paul Trillo visiting the David:

Then here’s AJ from the NYT doing a neat day-to-night transition:

And lastly, Hugues Bruyère used a 360º camera to capture this scene, then animate it in post (see thread for interesting details):

It’s insane to me how much these emerging tools democratize storytelling idioms—and then take them far beyond previous limits. Recently Karen X. Cheng & co. created some wild “drone” footage simply by capturing handheld footage with a smartphone:

Now they’re creating an amazing dolly zoom effect, again using just a phone. (Click through to the thread if you’d like details on how the footage was (very simply) captured.)

Meanwhile, here’s a deeper dive on NeRF and how it’s different from “traditional” photogrammetry (e.g. in capturing reflective surfaces):

Last year my friend Bilawal Singh Sidhu, a PM driving 3D experiences for Google Maps/Earth, created an amazing 3D render (also available in galactic core form) of me sitting atop the Trona Pinnacles. At that time he used “traditional” photogrammetry techniques (kind of a funny thing to say about an emerging field that remains new to the world), and this year he tried processing the same footage (comprised of a couple simple orbits from my drone) using new Neural Radiance Field (“NeRF”) tech:

For comparison, here’s the 3D model generated via the photogrammetry approach:

The file is big enough that I’ve had some trouble loading it on my iPhone. If that affects you as well, check out this quick screen recording:

The power & immersiveness of rendering 3D from images is growing at an extraordinary rate. NeRF Studio promises to make creation much more approachable:

The kind of results one can generate from just a series of photos or video frames is truly bonkers:

Here’s a tutorial on how to use it:

Check out this high-speed overview of recent magic courtesy of my friend Bilawal:

Photogrammetry is an art form that has been around for decades, but it’s never looked better thanks to ML techniques like Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF). This video shows a wide range of 3D captures made using this technique. And I gotta say, NeRF really breathes new life into my old photo scans! All these datasets were posed in COLMAP and trained + rendered with NVIDIA’s free Instant NGP tools.

The visualizations for StyleNeRF tech are more than a little trippy, but the fundamental idea—that generative adversarial networks (GANs) can enable 3D control over 2D faces and other objects—is exciting. Here’s an oddly soundtracked peek:

And here’s a look at the realtime editing experience: