Archive notice: This article was originally published on 31 July 2020. It has been translated into English and lightly edited for clarity while preserving its historical context.
Corporate Gold membership
Microsoft joined the Blender Foundation Development Fund as a Corporate Gold member. At the time, this membership level represented a contribution of €2,500 per month, or €30,000 per year. Microsoft joined a sponsor roster that also included Nvidia, AMD, Intel, Ubisoft, Google and Epic Games.
Synthetic data for machine learning
The announcement linked Microsoft’s interest in Blender to the creation of synthetic 3D human models and images used for training AI systems. A Microsoft Research paper described applications including hand-tracking research. Synthetic data can reduce the dependence on captured datasets, but its usefulness still depends on how faithfully the generated material represents the target conditions.
Teams considering the same approach should validate Blender versions, scene-generation methods and dataset bias before using synthetic output in production research.
Sources
https://www.blender.org/press/microsoft-joins-the-blender-development-fund/
https://fund.blender.org/corporate-memberships/
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/uploads/prod/2019/09/2019-10-01-Synthetic-Data-with-Digital-Humans.pdf
