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French
During Laval Virtual 2023, we met Emova, a French startup working on a solution for creating realistic digital twins. The idea is to allow you to test products such as jewelry, cosmetics, fashion accessories, clothes.
Of course, virtual try on experiences are not new, but Emova aims to stand apart from the crowd. Emova CEO Gael Seydoux told us he wanted to avoid augmented reality since it can be underwhelming: poor tracking, 3D objects rendered on a smartphone and therefore not very realisic due to hardware limitations.
Emove told us their 3D avatars are rendered using Unreal Engine, in order to achieve photorealistic rendering.
In a nutshell, Emova only requires three pictures of your head to create an avatar with your face and hairstyle. The process takes 1 to 2 minutes. You don’t need a powerful workstation: everything is handled in the cloud, and the real-time rendering is streamed to your smartphone or computer. Last, but not least, Emova provides an API that will allow you to use the same avatar on every website that uses the Emova technology. You won’t need to create dozens of avatars.
Even though Unreal Engine is used as a renderer, Emova doesn’t use Metahumans. They rely on a specific avatar system which allows them to handle hairstyles automatically. Basically, the pictures sent to create the avatar are matched to existing hairstyles, and a pre-built 3D hairstyle is chosen from an asset database. Emova is working hand in hand with Silo.AI to achieve this.
Unfortunately, Emova did not provide any hands-on demo of their product on their booth. However, they told us that an online demo should be available on their website in a couple of months.
In the meantime, the Emova team (about a dozen people) will keep working on upcoming features. Gael Seydoux explained us that Emova will go beyond 3D faces/heads: his team is also working on hands (which can be useful to display jewelry or watches, for example). Full body avatars are also on the way and should be available in 18 months.
We’ll follow upcoming announcements about this solution.
