Tracking Recent Topics & Trends in 3D Photo Generation

Today any smartphone can generate 3D Photos, but the popular AI-powered effect is actually fairly new. It was back in 2018 that Facebook first introduced a machine learning-based 3D photo feature that allowed users to generate an immersive 3D image from normal 2D pictures. Leveraging the dual-lens "portrait mode" capabilities that had recently become available in smartphones, the feature quickly gained traction and began evolving. This June, a research team from Virginia Tech, National Tsing Hua University and Facebook designed an algorithm that generates even more immersive 3D photos from a single RGB-D (colour and depth) image. And in August, Facebook democratized the technique with a novel system able to generate 3D photos even on low-end mobile phones or without an Internet connection. Facebook isn't the only tech giant using AI to generate 3D photos -- in recent months, Google has introduced its own AI techniques for generating 3D photos from 2D images.