You ever tried to maintain or enhance an ASP form that was built 20 years ago and enhanced by random devs with no documentation? I was working with ASP forms 15 years ago that were hopelessly outdated, included tons of technical debt and were not in the least bit user friendly. You can accomplish so much more with things that ship in every browser now. It’s not a very modern technology and you miss out on things that are now very standardized and much, much easier and quicker to develop and maintain.
Yeah, this seems like a much more likely option. Get a ton of good, completely unique scans of real world environments you could never replicate in testing and even if your product sucks and you fail entirely, you’ve got a really good dataset to sell to a big company that’s close on a product and needs data to enhance/refine on.
Does not make any sense for them since it’s not a unique environment. You could rent one hotel room or build a cheap replica and get all of your training done in one shot. They’re obviously trying to hit unique environments with many different unforeseen obstacles to overcome.