Here's something I didn't think that I'd be writing.
After the hiring of Matt Tancik and Angjoo Kanazawa coming on as an advisor, the NeRF community was rightfully questioning what will happen to nerfstudio. Those fears can now be assuaged with this announcement by Luma and nerfstudio. But it doesn't stop there. Luma will also be sponsoring the Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research (BAIR) lab that Professor Kanazawa heads up. The combination of these two means that the rate at which NeRFs are progressing shall increase. It also potentially could serve as a talent funnel for Luma to evaluate upcoming graduates.
NeRFs represent a massive step forwards in the reconstruction of the world in a photorealistic 3D medium. That's a big undertaking, that no one company will be able to achieve.
While the terms were not publicly disclosed, this can only be seen as an amazing step to keep one of the best NeRF platforms running. I'm told that Matt and Professor Kanazawa's day to day will remain the same, with Matt working on Luma and Professor Kanazawa as the Chief Scientific Advisor. This is not an acquisition of the Berkeley AI platform. Given that nerfstudio is completely open sourced, anyone can contribute to it.
