AI services specialist ESTsoft (CEO Jung Sang-won) announced on the 21st that the paper submitted to the international 3D web technology conference 'Web3D 2022' held in France last November (Paper title: InstantXR: Instant XR Environment on the Web Using Hybrid Rendering of Cloud-based NeRF with 3D Assets) won the Best Paper Award.

The conference is an international academic event that deals with a wide range of research and development cases related to web-based interactive 3D applications and VR·AR (Virtual·Augmented Reality), sponsored by ACM (Association for Computing Machinery). ACM is the first association of computer science societies in the world and also the highest authority in academia.

This research was conducted jointly by ESTsoft and the AI Research Group of the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) led by Dr. Yoo Byung-hyun.

The research team proposed a method to share virtual spaces quickly and easily using AI technology in the paper. Specifically, they built a virtual space that users can freely move around and enjoy with just a few photographs using the AI rendering technique, NeRF.

Especially, this research is significant for having demonstrated the foundational technology that allows NeRF rendering and the placement of 3D objects on the cloud, as well as proposing an efficient way to build 'digital twins', which replicate actual spaces into virtual ones in the 'metaverse' environment, which has been a hot topic worldwide until recently.

ESTsoft expects the achievements of this research to help advance their new AI businesses, such as virtual humans and commerce for virtual fitting of glasses. In particular, they have secured the technology to offer not only characters but also virtual spaces in their recently introduced virtual human creation and operation service 'AI Studio Perso', and plan to continue follow-up research for this purpose.

ESTsoft CEO Jung Sang-won said, "I am very pleased to receive recognition for our research at an international conference" and "We will strive to apply the results of this research beyond academic value to AI services that can change our lives".

The KIST Yoo Byung-hyun research team's study was conducted with the support of the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy and the Korea Evaluation Institute of Industrial Technology (KEIT) research fund (20012462) and the government (Ministry of Science and ICT) funding from the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2021R1A2C2093065), and from the institutional research program of the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) (Grant No. 2E31561).