Show HN: In3D – app for 3D scanning humans, trying digital cloth, and AR fun
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I'm Sergei, Dmitry's co-founder at in3D.
We are very excited to bring our scanning technology forward, and hope you'll enjoy it. We have lots of ideas of what can be done once you have your own digital twin in place.
What excites you the most to do with your 3D avatar? Please write us in comments.
I'm Dmitry, one of the founders of in3D.
With in3D app [0], anyone can create their realistic 3D avatar with just a phone camera within 30 seconds. Once scanned, users can animate their avatars, make funny videos in AR, try-on digital looks and play as themselves in GTA V, Second Life, and VRChat. Or order custom jeans at [1].
From the beginning, we wanted to get scanning UX as easy as possible so anyone can do this. We started off building a Virtual Fitting Room -- try-before-you-buy experience powered by a 3D scanning tech that we believed we could develop for smartphones. When we got the scanning working we realized that once a person is digitized the possibilities are much wider than just visualizing clothing. That's what we showcasing in the app now. Turning this in a product is still yet work to be done.
in3D exists for about 2 years now and it's been a really tough journey so far. My background is 100% technical -- I love coding, breaking/fixing stuff, did PhD about neural nets for image synthesis. Yet, by the end of PhD program, I knew I don't want to pursue an academic path and want to make something people would use. The problem was -- I had no idea how to start. Moscow is not Silicon Valley, people don't talk about startups on the streets and it was really hard to connect to people who built successful startups. I was lucky that in 2019 CVPR conference was in LA, so I booked a flight to SF and spent both CVPR and the week in SF asking how to build a company. I remember I asked a guy "Can you explain me how to do business development?" and when he responded "You just go and talk to people and businesses" and I thought well, it doesn't help much, I thought he would give me a to-do list or an algorithm. But we got lucky, we were accepted by Alchemist Accelerator, so we had a fantastic reason to move to SF. We learned a lot. The demo day though was in the beginning of February 2020 and we ended up raising only $50k before Covid. The tech did not work well at that time and we had no product. Luckily, we found some consulting work, got some profit from currency exchange, and managed to survive the hard times and raise more 8 months after. It became a bit less stressful since. Yet I understand better and better why investors are not excited about first-time founders -- we make mistakes every freaking day no matter how much we talk to experienced mentors.
Another interesting bit is how I met business co-founder. We connected during Covid, I was in US, he was in Israel. We've met in person only in a year from the moment he had shares assigned. Might sound blunt, but it's just been very natural -- he started contributing to in3D without asking permission or waiting on formal agreements. This might be the only way the co-founding relationships can start, some magic should happen.
We have also launched on ProductHunt today [2], would appreciate your support!