[tootie]

That's an interesting POV and I do actually see business popping up whose core competency is managing 3d models. Particularly for retail products like furniture. No one has a really smooth process and costs are high, but there is definitely activity going on and progress is being made.

[AndrewKemendo]

I can name probably a dozen companies trying to win the 3D object CRM game, but nobody is in the lead currently. It's still too early for standards to emerge and most content creators are duplicating effort across product lines eg. Target, Houzz, Wayfair are all modeling the same object in different ways (photogrammetry, hand modeling etc...).

3D content creation is one of, if not the biggest bottleneck for AR.

[roymurdock]

This is an area where Amazon/AWS/Sumerian are going to shine.

I can see a world where retailers on Amazon.com are incentivized or forced to submit 3D models of their products along when creating a for sale posting.

Consumers will put on their AR glasses, or use WebVR to to visualize the item before they purchase.

Amazon will have the gatekeeping power to force vendors to use a certain standard 3D modeling process, or have an in-house team receive the products and use photogrammetry/CAD modeling.

How much value/productivity will this generate - separate question but one worth asking.

[AndrewKemendo]

Maybe.

However Amazon (et al) have trouble just getting good 2D images from Vendors and is not making much of a push at all to get vendors to build 3D content.

This is a long standing problem: Should retailers do the modeling or vendors? It's expensive and hard on infrastructure to do it, and CAD standards aren't consistent enough to use that avenue. Vendors aren't tech savvy and have questionable practices for investing in marketing/sales materials, including photography because it doesn't scale.

I could go all day on this, but I won't. Bottom line is, none of the major platforms are stepping up and being leaders in AR on the content side. It's pretty marginal efforts so the results are marginal. I think everyone is waiting around for the Apple glasses now.

[shiftpgdn]

Photogrammery software has become pretty remarkable. A single camera and a turntable will turn out fairly good 3d models/meshes as long as there aren't a lot of reflective surfaces.

[tootie]

Or this kind of nonsense happens:

https://www.recode.net/2017/11/16/16666662/williams-sonoma-o...

[fsloth]

That's a sweet 100M for off-the-shelf components. Oh boy.

[PretzelPirate]

Does Amazon have a history of forcing digital content to be input for certain items?

I've been really annoyed that all food sellers aren't required to provide a list of ingredients and nutritional info to Amazon when selling on the platform (the US government also doesn't make them available via the FDA). That data would let Amazon build a food graph so people could really search for products that fit them.

For example: I want a cookie that is like an Oreo, but has less sugar.

Today, they just can't answer these questions without making some big assumptions, and can't expose the ingredients via an API so we can build cool products with the data.

[roymurdock]

That's actually a really interesting idea. Big food co's would fight it like hell, and I don't think a large volume of food moves through Amazon.com at the moment, but the API possibilities here would be very fun to play around with.