If you’ve bought anything online, you’ve faced the dilemma of having to imagine what the thing you’re buying looks like before you hit the buy button. You’ve faced that often, frankly. Maybe multiple times a day.
Even ordering a bag of Cheetos from a delivery app leaves you squinting and wondering.. Is that the right size? The right flavour?
This part of the online consumer world can suck. Take it from me.
Like an idiot, I bought these, which were labeled ‘Biggie and Tupac garden gnomes,’ and are photographed to look like they’d be suitable for that purpose. They sell online for anywhere from $25-$35 each, plus shipping.
But they’re not garden gnomes at all. They arrived barely 3 inches tall. They’re useful for nothing, and a total ripoff. The image to the side there? That’s not far from 1:1 scale.
The info that I had before making that purchase was incomplete, being a single picture and some clearly fake online reviews, and so I got scammed.
This isn’t a rarity. I recently bought what was advertised as an anti snoring mini-CPAP device (seen right). The images and fake reviews claimed it was amazing tech, and at just $40, I bought two. CPAPs can run thousands of dollars, so this seemed a good solution.
But those 2D images were purposefully blurry, from behind, and covering up that the device had no actual working machinery inside. The reviews were fake, and Amazon doesn’t give a shit about policing scams on its marketplace so there’s dozens of listings for them, all with 1 star average scores.
What the device did have, was a cheap charging cable and some randomly assigned wires inside, which actually shorted when I connected it to a live charger and set my bed on fire. Repeat, it literally set my bed alight.
Now, not every e-commerce seller is a scam artist, and some go a long way to demonstrating their worth with pictures from every angle. That’s great, but it only goes so far.
The tech world, and more specifically the AR tech world, has long been working on a way to take products and turn them into a 3D rendered file. This means people can use their mouse to roll the product around, see it from every angle, zoom in, read the label, etc etc.
The old way of doing it was with a Computer Aided Design (CAD) file, which required a nerd to create, generally at some expense. If you want an idea of that process, this video will show you that, frankly, it’s a mess.
Nobody wants to do that from scratch for every product they sell if they don’t have to, which is why most e-commerce in the world relies on shitty 2D imagery.
But a 3D demo is next level. When you can see a product up close, spin it about, go in and see specific elements, now you’re getting the full sales experience. Now you know what you’re getting. It’s like being in a showroom, being able to pick up a product and really get a sense of it.
Check out this glamour watch demo for an idea of what I’m talking about.
So assuming the whole world of ecommerce would rather a 3D demonstration than a 2D demo (and they do) and knowing that the much ballyhooed Metaverse will require the entire world to be wireframed and 3D rendered if it’s going to be a thing, perhaps Toggle 3D and, by association, Nextech3D.AI (NTAR.C) are right in a place where the whole damn world will beat a path to their door.
I tried the Toggle platform from the position of a completely uneducated, untrained guy with no 3D experience, and you can see in this video interview with Nextech CEO Evan Gappelberg that from starting a free Toggle account to getting my first 3D model in place took about 45 seconds.
I could spin it, change textures, fabrics, colours, and eventually save it as a 3D project ready for my sales site.
But that’s not the online industry killer. What Nextech has coming is the boss monster here.
The current system relies on having an existing CAD file to upgrade to 3D. Let’s be clear, there are billions of those out there already, but there are *trillions* of shitty 2D images that need to be upgraded along the way.
So what Nextech is working on, and will have finished by year end, is a system that takes an uploaded 2D photo like those seen above, and uses artificial intelligence (AI) processes to turn it 3D, with colours, textures, etc. This system will change this process from one that requires trained people with expensive software and instead will make it nearly automatic so a goof like me can get it done en masse.
This is something Nextech has patents out on too, so it’s not a system that’ll be shared, or replicated, but one that will be ubiquitous. You wanna get this work done, you’re going to need to go through Nextech.
See the above interview for more information, but this is REALLY IMPORTANT work that most people don’t understand is necessary just yet. But when that necessity becomes clear, it’ll be a rush to get it done everywhere.
It’s no wonder that the global 3D display market is expected to grow to $484.74 billion by 2030.
NOTE: Toggle 3D (TGGL) stock is being sold off, as happens whenever a spinout occurs from one company to another. Let people get their dividend before you get in, but do get in.
— Chris Parry
FULL DISCLOSURE: Nextech 3D AI and Toggle 3D AI are Equity Guru marketing clients.
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