Do you have any source for scene reconstruction being hollywood-quality given 50+ images 10 years ago (assuming the images don't come from a controlled environment)? I can find for example this from 2016: https://substance3d.adobe.com/magazine/go-scan-the-world-pho... However, there's still a lot of manual work involved, and you don't easily get near-perfect PBR textures (which would be what I'd consider hollywood-quality). I'd say the devil is in the details - if you want the best quality, you'd still need to control a lot of the environment.

The more assumptions you can bake into the parameters of some model, the more degrees of freedom you get in the actual measurement process (e.g. reducing the amount of actual data necessary).

Agisoft PhotoScan was publicly released in 2010 and I know someone who used the beta for scenes in a movie that hit cinemas in 2014.

But yes, the images totally came from a controlled environment. They rented like 50 similar cameras and hardware-synchronized the shutters.

True but 50+ images only work if they're good quality.

What would really make a difference if you could make a decent model from 30 images snapped by a drunk teenager on their $200 budget phone in bad lighting.

If money and resources are not an object then yeah it's easy but for most people it is.

Renting a matterport pro is like $200 per day, so that should be well within the budget of most hobbyists

Yeah but it becomes a totally different thing if you have it in your pocket whenever needed.

The best camera is the one you have with you, and the same goes for this too.