Kiri Innovations has announced that it will support reconstruction of 3D scenes via Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) in Kiri Engine, its 3D scanning app for Android and iOS devices.

The implementation, which Kiri Innovations claims is a first for Android phones and tablets, is being demoed at CES 2023 this week, and is due in open beta in Q2 2023.

A new AI-based alternative to photogrammetry or LIDAR for 3D scanning
Developed by researchers at UC Berkeley, Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) are a new method for training a neural network to generate and optimise a volumetric representation of a scene from a set of source images.

Although its creators focused on NeRF as a means of synthesising new views of a scene, the volumetric representation can be converted into a 3D mesh, making it an alterative to photogrammetry for 3D scanning.

The technology is available on desktop machines via Nvidia’s free Instant NeRF, and on iOS devices via Luma’s free Luma AI app.

Now coming to Android phones and tablets in Kiri Engine
Kiri Innovations’ adoption of Neural Radiance Fields will also make NeRF available on Android phones and tablets, since Kiri Engine – previously purely a photogrammetry-based app – is available for Android and iOS.

You can read more about Kiri Engine in this story.

Although NeRF support is only due in beta later this year, the app can already export “NeRF-ready data” to nerfstudio, the open-source library for creating, training and visualising NeRFs, via its Camera Pose feature.

The feature was introduced as part of the new Developer Mode in Kiri Engine 1.17 last month.

Pricing and system requirements
Kiri Engine is available for Android 7.0 and iOS 13.0. NeRF support is due to become available in open beta within the app in “Q2 2023”.

The app itself is free to download, and users can export up to three photogrammetry-based 3D scans for free per week; to export more requires a paid Premium account, which now cost $9.99/month or $49.99/year.

Kiri Innovations told us that it has not yet decided on the pricing model for the new NeRF capabilities, but that it is “likely that at least a limited number of free exports will be available”.

 
Download Kiri Engine for Android from Google Play

Download Kiri Engine for iOS from the iOS App Store

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