If anyone else is having trouble loading the CSS for the page, go to https://www.blender.org/wp-content/themes/bthree/style.css?x... to be Captcha'd by Cloudflare - it should load fine after that.

I'm quite interested in the academic research aspect, especially since our computational geometry group uses or plans on using Blender. However, I'm unclear about the details of this announcement. Is it related to funding opportunities or suggesting experimental features?

I think there is some problem loading CSS for this site. Could be my current network though...

edit: you might need to auth yourself as human to cloudflare on blender.org for the site to display correctly.

https://www.blender.org/lab/ might be the better link (especially given the CSS ssues)

What's the label "requires funding and stakeholders". I can't see any explanation of that in the announcement

If there are contributors to Blender from the industry, who are they? It's easy to understand how big tech can be contributing to Linux, data processing pipelines, web frameworks, compilers etc. but it's harder to see who has both the skills and incentives for design tools. Maybe some game studios have the necessary slack?

I wonder if any of the Rendering Light Transport work includes work towards a spectral renderer.

Not sure if I understood correctly. Can we as individuals contribute to any of these projects?

This Blender Lab page "Beyond Mouse and Keyboard" page mentions the "wheel menu":

https://code.blender.org/2025/07/beyond-mouse-keyboard/

Here's an wonderful Blender extension, the Sculpt Wheel, that has concentric rings, and is deeply customizable (this video was posted 15 hours ago so it's fresh and current):

Blender 4.5 Sculpt Wheel - Glyph+

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhO-aU512NE&t=1s

It sounds like they're doing their own version of the experimental build thing that's long been popular in the Blender community. That's a good thing.