Benjamin Bojko

🔴 Finally! NVIDIA has finally made the code for Neuralangelo public! It has the ability to transform any video into a highly detailed 3D environment, and it's a technology related to but DIFFERENT from NeRF. 💡 Here's how it works: It takes a 2D video as input, showing an object, monument, building, landscape, etc., from various perspectives and analyzes details such as depth, size, and the shapes of objects. From this, the AI sketches an initial 3D model, similar to how an artist molds a figure. This representation is then refined to highlight more details, just as an artist would make the final touches when sculpting. The result is a 3D environment/model, perfect for use in any environment. Imagine the applications it will have for video games, cinema, virtual environments, VR, and more! 📽️🎮 💡 More details: A year ago, an article was presented on a groundbreaking technique called NVIDIA's Instant NeRF. This technique turns images into stunning 3D scenes in a short time, ideal for creating realistic models for video games and other applications. Although Instant NeRF had a lot of potential, the generated models were not perfect and often lacked detailed structures, appearing somewhat cartoonish. A year on, NVIDIA releases a new technique based on Instant NeRF, named Neuralangelo. This enhances the fidelity of surface structures. While NeRF reconstructs real objects in virtual environments from images or videos, Instant NeRF speeds up this process, and Neuralangelo further improves the quality, making the generated objects appear even more realistic when examined up close. Neuralangelo improves Instant NeRF's approach in two key ways related to the hash grid encoding technique: 1⃣ Numerical gradients have been used to compute higher-order derivatives as a smoothing operation. This optimizes the "hash grid" encoding using numerical rather than analytical gradients, providing a smoother input to the network that produces the 3D model. 2⃣ A "coarse-to-fine" optimization has been implemented in the hash grids to control different levels of detail. That is, they first focus on a smoothed version of the scene, and then refine it with more detailed updates. Well, as Arthur C. Clarke said, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."