Sep 9, 2021
Volu, AR content creation for everyone
You can download Volu from the App Store today
Today, is the day.
Volu is finally available to download from the App Store. From today, you can capture your own volograms using only your iPhone and no additional equipment. And you can start here 👉 Volu by Volograms on the App Store.
This is a huge milestone for Volograms, not only because our amazing team has dedicated a huge effort to make Volu a reality, but also because its the realisation of our mission: bringing volumetric video capture closer to everyone. We believe that user-generated content is going to be key for the success of the whole Augmented Reality ecosystem, and Volu is the first app that allows anyone to capture people in AR. And we are looking forward to seeing what you create!
How to capture your own volograms
But let’s get to it: how does it work? Very easy! To capture a vologram you just need to tap on the + button in the Creator screen and record a person as if you were recording a normal video. After that, Volu takes care of the rest: it transforms your standard video into a volumetric video, which you can then play with in AR. Check out this very short tutorial 👇
Volu uses AI to estimate a 3D model for every frame of the video, textures them using a combination of what the camera sees and what the neural network has estimated, and compresses them so they are temporally coherent and don’t use too much space of your phone’s storage.
Volu is even able to estimate the 3D shape and texture of a person even in areas that the camera doesn’t see, such as the back or the back of the neck. We are able to achieve this thanks to our deep learning algorithms, which have been trained with thousands of high-quality 3D human models captured our professional volumetric capture studios.
AR content creation like never before
Once your vologram has been processed, hit Play and start playing with it in AR. You can place your vologram on any surface, rotate it, make it super tall, or teeny tiny, it’s up to you! Furthermore, Volu features another very cool creative tool: superpowers! These full-body AR filters supercharge your creations 😎 .
Volu has been in public beta for a couple of months and our amazing testers have captured thousands of volograms. Our users have used Volu for marketing purposes (for example, using a mini-me to introduce a product), for dancing videos (all kinds of dances, even breakdance!), work-out videos (my favourite is one doing step aerobics over a cucumber 🤣), fashion (even professionally!), AR memories of their loved ones, getting to know people, AR memes, bringing people closer (taking them virtually to places or events they can’t go with the current restrictions), and for cool videos for social media (featuring their doubles as giants or gnomes!). You can check some of these creations in Volu’s social media accounts. Volu powers this new generation of user-generated content for AR, and this is only the beginning!
What’s coming next
We are just getting started! In the coming months we have a bunch of cool features coming up, including ARKit’s people occlusions for more realistic and immersive creations, more tutorials and tricks within the app, a way to add friends to share your volograms with, a way to export your volograms to other platforms and, of course, an Android version!
So, if you have a feature request, feedback or want to share your creations with our community, you are invited to join our Discord server. We are looking forward to hearing your thoughts! Lastly, remember to tag us on social media with #volograms or #getvolu (or directly mention us @volograms or @getvolu), we regularly share of our users creations. We are looking forward to seeing what you create! 😃
