Insta3D is a new, free mobile app that makes an animated avatar. They took that app a step further and created Insta3D Maker, a web service that is currently connected to Shapeways for 3D printing where you can turn yourself and friends into customizable 3D printed figurines – all you need is a selfie! We sat down to chat with the creators of Insta3D Maker to hear about where their idea came from, what challenges they faces and how they got into 3D printing.
What was your original idea with this app?
For most people, 3D technology is not easily accessible – it is very complex, time-consuming and expensive. With Insta3D Maker, our customer can get a customized and printable 3D model without any 3D modeling effort. And, anyone can get their avatar 3D printed in color with just one selfie on the website.
You mentioned that 3D printing was not part of the original plan – how did it evolve into the final product you have now?
For our Insta3D mobile app, our original plan was to use the cute avatar and sell the accessories by IAP (InApp Purchase), including hairstyle, movement, apparel, etc. During the first demo with our Japanese customers, they were highly interested in printing themselves as a figurine. They even suggested us to change the style from 5 heads to 3 heads in order to make the figurine cuter and less realistic. We were able to update and make that happen within one month, and now Japan has been selling their figurines via our mobile app for couple months. I believe Insta3D is among the first CG (Computer Graphic) and printing combination apps in the world, and customers can play and print as they wish straight from their personal smart phone. (Currently available in Japan, and wish to deploy it to US market via Shapeways in 2 months)
How did you learn 3D modeling? What other technology did you know/use to create the app?
Our core technology is in the cloud, we need one photo to generate the face, and basically, we collect the feature spots in everyone’s face, send and compute the data in the cloud.
What challenges did you run into while creating the app? What challenges did adding 3D printing add?
Honestly, we learned that 3D Printing and CG is very complicated. The numbers of polygons are totally different! We can only play the avatars with less than 10,000 polygons on mobile smoothly. For printing, we need to upscale polygons to at least 300,000 polygons to get the high quality figurines. We overcame the problem and made this happen in the past year after we established Speed 3D.
Have you promoted your app? You mentioned it getting up to #5 in an app category – how did that happen!?
Several popular bloggers and social media influencers shared their Insta3D avatars on their social media sites. Magically Insta3D became a fab on the Internet overnight. So we know the power of social media and we can leverage that and build up a community to promote our mobile app to get more user feedback.
How has 3D printing changed how you plan next steps for your business – if at all?
Currently Insta3D 2.0 is very popular in the US already, but it is only the CG mode. We plan to launch a new version Insta3D 3.0 with newer 3D engine, and it will be available for both CG and printing mode within one app. Customers can make the figurines they see in the CG mode and go to print; it is a big project for us and we wish to co-work to Shapeways to fulfill the printing part.
What updates do you see for Insta3D Maker in the future?
We are collecting more user feedback to make the next steps of Insta3D maker, I think it is very early-stage now and wish to work together with Shapeways to get customers feedback to fine tune the products.
It’s really amazing to hear about this process and especially wonderful to see two techonolgies merge so seamlessly. The team of Insta3D is clearly working on some wonderful things in the 3D world, and it’s great to see that just a section of their business can be fully run by 3D printing. Customizable, personal figurines are not only fun to make “yourself” with no 3D modeling skills required, but make great gifts for graduation, wedding cake toppers, Mother’s and Father’s Day and beyond! Help them with user feedback by downloading the app and creating your own, customized avitar. We’ll patiently wait here in the US (and Europe!) until we can get our very own figurines. Check out the video of Dan, one lucky Shapeways employee who already got his own 3D avitar!
Are you working on an app that uses 3D printing? Tell us about it!