Link to the data is in a Github repo at the bottom: <a href="https://github.com/Activision/caldera">https://github.com/Activision/caldera</a><p>Reading the article, they don't seem to know what people should do with it. It feels like a recruiting tool more than anything, especially given the non-commercial license.
A lot of the comments here are very cynical, perhaps because they’re focused on the license or the use for gaming.<p>However as someone in the graphics community, these kinds of assets are great for researchers and demo purposes. Other scenes like this are the Disney Moana Island, Intels Moore Lane house, Sponza, various NVIDIA scenes, Amazons bistro, and animal logics Alab2 scene. Khronos also maintains a set of test assets for the same purpose with glTF.<p>When we develop content creation applications, they’re great for benchmarking ingest and making sure we have good feature coverage.<p>They’re great for graphics researchers to have shared bases for data processing, rendering and other important R&D.<p>The non-commercial aspect just means you can’t use them for commercial marketing, but they’re hugely beneficial for any kind of graphics research.<p>Having real production quality data is a huge undertaking for researchers to do in addition to their own novel work.<p>Thus far, many sample assets have been simple standalone assets, film quality production assets, or archvis. Activision releasing something from a AAA game is a huge boon for people targeting that market.<p>I’ll also call attention to Natalya being involved. She’s recently joined Activision as CTO , but has been a very influential graphics engineer with a long and storied career before that. She has long helped run the excellent Advances in Real-time Rendering courses at SIGGRAPH (<a href="https://advances.realtimerendering.com/" rel="nofollow">https://advances.realtimerendering.com/</a>) and I believe this release comes from the same intention of mutually advancing shared knowledge.
Yet again the word "open source" is being used in a way that doesn't make any sense. We're going to wind up with a weird situation where "open source" means "free and open source" for software specifically but just means "available free-of-charge" for data and ML model weights. Which is strange. The word "free" is right there. This is not "source code", and it certainly isn't "open source" even if it was.<p>I know this is a tangent, but unfortunately it bears repeating.
"Find us an AI use case that we can then turn around and market without compensating you for it you researching piece of shit.<p>Sincerely,
Activision"