The best and brightest minds of our times -- working tirelessly to improve your shopping experience
I think you might have it backwards. This team seems very focused on fundamental open-ended NeRF/gaussian/lightfield research. It is a natural and good thing that someone at Google found a reasonably relevant way to apply some of the tech the team has developed. Finding an application of the tech within Google helps justify continued investment in fundamental research and provides a source of usage data and feedback to the team. Also, who wouldn't want to see what they made get used by millions of people instead of living only on a conference demo page?
Communication, Trade, Commerce, Navigation, Education/Learning, are timeless needs for 100s of years. We buy and sell products all the time. And if something that improves our day to day shopping experience then we are solving for one of the core needs for us as humans.
Just because something makes shopping easier (and does this, really?) doesn’t mean it’s a smart or meaningful use of brainpower. Not every small convenience is worth solving when bigger problems are out there.
And I still can't search for a pair of jeans of a specific size, brand and style over all online shops ... Sorry, but jeez what are these brightest minds doing?
You'd think google products would have this feature considering the enormous developer capacity they have. But i think they're getting there.
If you look past the shopping angle- being able to generate 3D objects out of 2D images is a rather huge milestone.
Yes but by necessity it is making up stuff.
It reminds me of: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vxq9yj2pVWk
and in particular the line "enlarge the Z-axis"