During SIGGRAPH this past August, we saw Shutterstock announce their move into NeRFs. Only a few months later, we are hearing it directly from the Shutterstock team.
This past Tuesday, three members of the Shutterstock team held a panel at Ad Week NYC. The topic was Do More with Less: The Magic of Virtual Locations and Generative AI in Marketing.
The panel featured Aiden Darné VP, Global Head of Shutterstock Studios, Meg Vazquez-Pastrana, Head of Creative, and Dade Orgeron, VP of 3D Innovation. It was a stacked panel and in the roughly thirty minute panel, they covered how the landscape of 3D has fundamentally begun to shift.
Part of the benefits discussed about NeRFs is how they will affect the end to end process. While people look at Radiance Fields as a virtual location, they offer more, including the previsualization phase. Prior workflows needed a model to be built before a team can look at it, and while that's still the case, the upfront work is a magnitude easier.
As Meg directly states, any camera is able to create a NeRF. You are able to have these complete photorealistic scenes— the exact places where you are going to shoot in front of a client to have the upfront discussions about expectations, needs, and feasibility. Expanding off of that, you are able to walk through with your DP and production team to evaluate and block out what you want to shoot. And on the flip side, if something is not working, it gives you the opportunity to iterate faster, before large monetary decisions are made, so that both client and production come away happier.
Something that was interesting to me was when Aiden mentioned that Reckitt has really embraced virtual production. A lot of what we've covered thus far has revolved around potential scenes and larger demonstrations of radiance fields, but I believe that a massive use case will be how radiance fields disrupt both the Ecommerce and retail industries. I firmly believe that brands will begin and need to wholeheartedly embrace the interactive and photorealistic nature of radiance fields in the coming months.
As Dade said, "now is the time to start." Radiance Fields are burgeoning and its important to begin building. Brands of all shapes and sizes should be viewing radiance fields as a business imperative towards forming closer bonds with their consumers. Companies such as NVIDIA and Luma are squarely positioned to capitalize on this front. Shutterstock has further partnered with NVIDIA to help create these foundational models for 3D. The amount of work to be done here is truly massive. NVIDIA has its work cut out for them.
Aiden also touched a bit more about the ways that radiance fields are helping companies achieve sustainability goals. Now, instead of having to fly an entire crew out to a location, people are able to film locally in front of an LED volume, without sacrificing any of the production quality. In fact, because of the autonomy that comes with radiance fields, you have more flexibility over the controlled environment. This leads to faster timelines, lower budgets, and hopefully higher quality output.
For those who missed the packed Ad Week NYC event, you can catch the recording here. We'll be keeping a close eye on what Shutterstock does, but it appears the future is bright for radiance fields at the New York City based company.
