3D selfie technology is coming! The new name of selfie technology is Nerfie

There is nothing new to say about selfies but many may not be aware of its origins. At one time, smartphones had front cameras, but they were not suitable for taking pictures for video calls. Some smartphones could not even take pictures with the front camera, then people would turn the primary camera towards themselves and take pictures. Most likely the concept of Selfie came around in 2002. However, gradually it became very popular and you all know the next scene.

What is Nerfie?

More and more advanced technology is being used in selfies keeping in mind the huge demand of the users. A team of researchers has developed a new selfie method called Nerfie which they refer to as the next generation selfie. 3D selfies can be taken with this new technology.

Researchers from the University of Washington and Google Research have come up with ways to take a more comprehensive snap over a specific moment of time. Instead of 2D images, people can now take 3D selfie images, allowing anyone to see the person in the selfie as well as see what's around them. The most interesting thing is that if you want to use the Nerfie method, you will not need any expensive or exclusive hardware for your phone, as long as any camera is available to smart.

3D selfie image

Many of us know that smartphones require special hardware, such as LIDAR scanners, to capture 3D images. However, phones with this hardware are quite expensive and may not be accessible to everyone. And so the emergence of Nerfie. If you want to take a nerfie, you will take videos from different angles with your phone's camera and this will turn into a special selfie.

Creating 3D models from video data is called Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF). Through this, 2D images are taken from different sides and converted into 3D images through calculations. However, there is a drawback to this NeRF method. You have to stay still until all the side pictures are captured.

It's easy to take stills from multiple angles while holding a smartphone in front of you while taking a video, but the process can take several seconds to complete and this means the subject can keep running, although trying as hard as you can to get accurate results. To address this, the research team developed a new method they called Deformable Neural Radiance Fields (D-NeRF). In this way, it can differentiate between the frames, how far the subjects have moved and take the best 3D image by omitting the extra part through proper calculations.

Hopefully, in the near future, Nerfie will be quite popular among the users as we are already seeing the use of 3D images on Facebook. Social media users will capture 3D images to present themselves in a more interesting way in restaurants, hangouts.