A shout out to McDonald’s (yes, the hamburger joint) for kicking off the Lunar New Year in January with something really new in terms of mainstream use of an emerging technology for immersive experiences. The company launched a 30-second spot developed by the artist Karen X Cheng that employed NeRF technology to create a 3D scene.
While NeRF (neural radiance field) technology isn’t exactly new, it’s now advanced to the point of being useful in practical applications. NeRF uses AI and neural networks to convert a series of 2D images into a 3D visual. With just a small sampling of photographs, NeRF technology is able to produce complex 3D scenes. It’s a major advance in terms of simplification over previous methods, where hundreds of cameras had to be positioned around an object to capture every angle, and then a huge amount of computer processing power was needed to render the images.
See the commercial here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34KeBnSwvmc
Along with the commercial, the McDonald’s Lunar New Year campaign included an AR filter which allows anyone to experience, in their own living room, Cheng’s 3D sculpture that transitions the year of the tiger over to the year of the rabbit. Check it out on Instagram by scanning the code:
There’s also a metaverse experience: a virtual space that includes 3D sculptures of the 12 Chinese zodiac animals — https://www.spatial.io/s/McDonalds-Lunar-New-Year-Experience-63bb3736f2513ed236ed3162?share=2851783860039212846
And more (fun) information on NeRF: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YX5AoaWrowY&t=23s