In mid of September DGG organized its first 3D Pipeline Day. The event aimed to push forward the development of scalable 3D pipelines for massive-scale 3D use cases. At the same time, it was a fantastic opportunity to facilitate networking and exchange among DGG’s clients and partners and encourage cooperation. Due to known reasons, the event had to be held remotely. The agenda consisted of four impulse talks by the DGG team and six dedicated presentations by our guests.

With a great diversity of experts from the industry and research, presentations covered a variety of topics all related to massive-scale 3D pipelines, ranging from 3D model creation to data management and finally application in retail use-cases. It was possible to create a holistic overview over different fields, especially comparing existing industrial solutions and the current state of the art research results.

For example, Pedro Santos from Cultlab3D showed how their scanners can nowadays scan with extremely high quality, combining different 3D scanning technologies and utilizing the strength of each of them individually. “The idea is to do nothing manually”, says Pedro, after presenting their conveyor belt setup with two scanning stations. The industry perspective was soon after given by Sascha Rybarczyk, General Manager at botspot, who talked about their product scanner botscan MOMENTUM. With their new scanner, botspot serves the retail market. The compact design and automated scanning process as well as the integration of DGG’s RapidCompact make the new setup convenient and easy to use.

Tobias Nientiedt, Principal CGI & Digital Content Production at OTTO, gave an impressive demonstration on how they set up the transformation from photography to CGI. As one of the innovation leaders in this area, OTTO already tackles the challenge of massive-scale 3D content creation for retail. OTTO uses CGI within their online shop, replacing traditional photography with digitally created content. Regarding real-time 3D, AR functionalities are available in their shop Your Home, usable also with mobile applications on iOS and Android.

On the Configure-Price-Quote (CPQ) side, Albert Ortig, CEO at Roomle, and Ekki Beier, CEO of intelligentgraphics, shared their insights. Albert impressively demoed the usability of Roomle’s applications. Switching live to his phone screen and putting 3D objects of furniture into his environment gave a vivid impression of the robustness and capabilities of Roomle’s 3D pipelines – which also involves RapidCompact. “We’ve been using the RapidCompact software over the past year and it’s allowed us to do things which were once impossible,” Albert said. Ekki surprised the audience with the first public release of the Open Configuration (OC) format. He explains: “OC is a neutral, light-weight, multi-purpose format, decoupling content-providing from content-processing apps/services/systems and thus provides a lot of flexibility such as multiple use cases for one and the same CPQ data.” 

The day was concluded by a presentation of Armin Eichert from ZEISS Vision Technology Solutions, presenting VISUFIT 1000, their virtual try-on system. The system allows users to virtually wear eyewear before purchasing. This makes the try-on process much faster and independent of the physical availability of the desired eyewear model. The respective 3D models are generated using nine cameras and 45 million data-precise pixels. With the “Virtual Fitting” technology, ZEISS aims to serve the optical industry and improve the shopping experience for both customer and optician.

We have been delighted to welcome all participants and have the opportunity to support the development of efficient and scalable 3D pipelines by bringing together experts and encouraging exchange. In 2021 we hope to be able to hold the event in Darmstadt but will surely have the event one way or another.

Find out more about the reasons why 3D is attractive for e-commerce and why delivery formats like glTF are a crucial.