In all the excitement from yesterday, Luma had one more surprise for us, announcing the Luma Render Fellowship totaling $100K. The amount will be split upon a few hand selected developers by Luma to help bring 3D to additional platforms.

We get a glimpse into where Luma is thinking about developing extensions, not that there are any surprises here. It seems natural that Luma wants to grab a foothold with these areas. People have been clamoring for additional extensions of NeRFs and Gaussian Splatting. As fast as things have been going, I think that they just might speed up a bit more.

I would like to focus on Shopify, in particular, as they recently announced a interactive 3D scanner, but unfortunately for their customers, it's built on top of photogrammetry. A Shopify plugin would be massive, as customers would be able to see photorealistic versions of what they're looking to purchase. Given Google's openness about moving NeRFs into product search, I'm still confused to why Shopify went this route. I see this is a massive white space for Luma or another company to fill.

If you, or anyone you know might be a good fit, I highly recommend that you give it a whirl and see where it goes. Luma can be a black box until they announce something huge, like fully working Gaussian Splatting and this gives people the chance to have access to their R&D and engineering team.

The Luma Render Fellowship will hopefully set a precedent for the development of additional avenues and services that people can provide with photorealistic 3D content. Which platform do you most want to see support added for?