Generative AI

For years the architecture visualization industry has been stuck with a strange limit. Studios can produce a still render so convincing you cannot tell it from a photograph, but the moment a client wants to move through that space, the cost jumps by an order of magnitude. Animation means cameras, keyframes, render farms, and days of compute per shot. So most projects ship as a handful of gorgeous frozen images, and the sense of actually being there never makes it to the viewer. Two things changed that recently. Image-to-video models can now invent believable motion from a couple of stills. And coding assistants like Claude can turn that footage into a polished, interactive site in an afternoon. I wanted to see how far that combination goes, so I built a small experiment. This is how it went. ...

Every e-commerce catalogue has a dirty secret, and it’s a number nobody likes to say out loud: the percentage of products that have a proper photo of a real person wearing them. Ours was 73%. Which means more than a quarter of what we sold, thousands of frames, was represented online by a flat shot of the product on a white background, while its neighbour had a crisp image of a model looking great in it. The model shots convert better. Everyone knows this. The problem is that closing the gap means a physical photoshoot, and a physical photoshoot does not scale. We took catalogue coverage from 73% to 100% in about a month. Not by shooting faster. By not shooting at all for the long tail. ...