Does anyone know what the end goal of this kind of research is or why there is so much interest?
Its definitely cool but is the idea just to make photogrammetry cheaper/easier?
Or are there other use cases I'm missing
All current forms of triangulation/meshing from fractcals, sdf, point clouds, etc, are relatively terrible and constrained, to fit existing pipelines (hence why most AR is just lackluster model viewers)
Make it differentiable is a step towards cramming it into a small model and output other forms, or trace directly, or just compress before say, extracting to some Tree-renderable format on the gpu