The Challenges of Releasing the Moana Island Scene

A tremendous amount of research has been done over the years using the Stanford bunny, the Cornell box and recently somewhat more complicated data sets. Yet, none of these data sets come close to representing the complexity that production houses and film studios handle on a daily basis. In recent years industry members have lamented this lack of realistic examples, and in return academics have requested that more representative examples be made available. Both of these points are valid, which in turn has led to the release of the Moana Island Scene dataset. However, while it sounds simple, the actual release of such data leads to numerous philosophical and practical questions. The goal of this paper is to present some of the challenges associated with releasing production data for academic use.