This has been a thing for a while. For example, here are a couple random papers from 2017: https://openaccess.thecvf.com/content_cvpr_2017/html/Varol_Learning_F

This has been a thing for a while. For example, here are a couple random papers from 2017: https://openaccess.thecvf.com/content_cvpr_2017/html/Varol_Learning_From_Synthetic_CVPR_2017_paper.html https://openaccess.thecvf.com/content_cvpr_2017/html/Varol_L..., https://openaccess.thecvf.com/content_ICCV_2017_workshops/w23/html/Abbasnejad_Using_Synthetic_Data_ICCV_2017_paper.html https://openaccess.thecvf.com/content_ICCV_2017_workshops/w2... or a newer one about deformable objects: https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.08898 https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.08898. You can even use a robot to manipulate things in real life to create synthetic data for a neural net.