Google Launches AI-Based 3D Asset Generation for Shopping Listings

Google’s looking to make it easier to replicate the in-store shopping experience online, via a new, AI-based system that simplifies 3D object capture, enabling you to better showcase your products within Google’s shopping listings.

As explained by Google:

“We’ve developed new generative AI techniques to create high quality and shoppable 3D product visualizations from as few as three product images […] This technology is already enabling the generation of interactive 3D views for a wide range of product categories on Google Shopping.”

As you can see in this example, using still images, and incorporating Google’s Veo AI model, the system can now generate good-looking 3D visualizations of your products for inclusion in Google Shopping listings.

Google says that its latest system uses its Veo AI video generation model to infer movement, and infill frames, creating more responsive, logical depictions of 3D objects than its past 3D generation models.

“A key strength of Veo is its ability to generate videos that capture complex interactions between light, material, texture, and geometry. Its powerful diffusion-based architecture and its ability to be finetuned on a variety of multi-modal tasks enable it to excel at novel view synthesis.”

That means that you can create better-looking 3D product depictions with fewer inputs. So now, more brands will be able to include interactive 3D models of their offerings for their Google Shopping displays.

“We discovered that this approach generalized effectively across a diverse set of product categories, including furniture, apparel, electronics and more. Veo was not only able to generate novel views that adhered to the available product images, but it was also able to capture complex lighting and material interactions (i.e., shiny surfaces), something which was challenging for the first- and second-generation approaches.”

So, better product depictions, enabling more responsive, engaging shopping, while the process will also facilitate the expansion of Google’s 3D object corpus, which could also be fed into VR models to enable the creation of virtual worlds that depict real objects that VR users can engage with.

Which is likely the next level of online shopping. You’ll never be able to fully recreate the in-store experience or the ability to touch and feel an object before purchase. But VR shopping, with displays of virtual items captured for Google Shopping displays, could get close.

It’s an interesting advance, and another novel, valuable use of the latest AI tech.

Google is gradually rolling out its advanced object generation models for Google Shopping displays.