[apinstein]

I started and ran a real estate photography platform from 2004-2018. We started r&d on this in ~2016 when consumer VR first came out. At the time we used photogrammetry and it was “dreadful” to try to capture due to mirrors, glass, etc.

So I have been following GS tech for a while. I’ve not yet seen anything (open source / papers) that quite gets there yet. I do think it will.

In my opinion, there are two useful ways GS can bring to this industry.

The first is ability to use photo capture to re-render as a high production quality video similar to what people do with Luma AI today. While this is a really cool capability, it’s also not really that hard to do anymore with drones and gimbals. So, the experience of creating the same thing via GS has to be better and easier, and it’s not clear when that will likely happen due to how painful the capture side is. You really need good real time capture feedback to make sure you have good coverage. Finding out there’s a hole once you’re off location is a deal breaker.

The second is to create VR capable experiences. I think the first real useful thing for consumers will be so you can walk around in a small three or 4 foot area and get a stereo sense of what it’s like to be there. This is an amazing consumer experience. But the practicality of scaling this depends on VR hardware and adoption, and that hasn’t yet become commonplace enough to make consumer use “adjacent possible” for broad deployment.

I could see it being used on super high end to start out.