Runway ML releases NeRF Platform, 3D Captures, in Beta

Seemingly out of nowhere and very quietly, a new NeRF platform has emerged on Runway ML. It is called 3D Captures and it launches with a web viewer in browser.

This represents the latest entry into the NeRF market, most recently joined by XSpada last week.

Runway and Luma also share an investor in Amplify Partners. It remains to be seen if there is any inter portfolio synergy powering Runway's backend.

Currently, it only accepts video files to be uploaded. While there hasn't been a formal announcement yet, it does appear right now on the Runway.ml website. For those wondering if these are definitely NeRFs, the hallmark view dependent effects of NeRFs are on full display and the video files are labeled as "nerf" on their website.

As I am writing this, I have a few NeRFs that are beginning to process. It's unclear as of right now if they are using their own model, leveraging one of the open source methods such as nerfstudio, or using Luma. Now that the first render is complete, it was labeled with a "ckpt", which is interestingly how nerfstudio labels their checkpoints.

More to come!