If you look past the shopping angle- being able to generate 3D objects out of 2D images is a rather huge milestone.

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.

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?

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?

Yeah :c, I guess it seems to work well but this kind of approach makes me sad. It's anti-truth in a way that NeRFs are not

Possibly: https://www.google.com/search?ibp=oshop&q=Google+Pixel+9+Pro...

That doesn't have the glass reflectivity I would expect from this latest technique.

That's not precisely true. Let me illustrate:

A client we did marketing for produces gaming rigs - the metal frames. He's putting it together in the USA, and is super proud of his product (simfab.com) and the way wires come together, the whole modular design. But he struggles with massive Chinese competition ripping his designs off, and also people not understanding which part of the product is his own, and which are the third parties.

So he has the wires in SolidWorks, and everything, but when he needs to showcase the product in 3D he lacks the meshes of all his partner products. And nobody ever's gonna give these out as it is industrial design intellectual property.

It is super apparent that at some point he starts doing lidar point-clouds and having these third-parties scanned (first), and eventually modeled in 3D again by some mesh artist.

Pretty sure his situation is super common. So this GOOG thing is huge for himself and others, who don't even have the lidar option.

Legitimate question: Is there any standard format that captures not just the geometry but all the detail of reflectance (subsurface scattering, etc.)?