Crystal ball: this is the Tesla self-driving car strategy. First deploy the hardware, then figure out the software.
In this case the real point of the depth-sensing camera hardware and machine-learning image analysis isn't hands-free selfies and robo-fashion advice. It's building a 3d model of your body to show what you would look like in different clothing, creating a clothes shopping experience that is competitive with shopping in person, and letting Amazon take on a big chunk of retail where it's not currently an appealing option.
100% correct. There is no way they included a depth sensor in this device just to blur the background. They may also be aiming to map any Amazon clothing purchases to 3D body shapes for a purely data driven approach to clothing recommendation to start with (as opposed to having 3D scans of every bit of clothing to do geometric fitting, which is prohibitively labor intensive.) So they'll know your shape, what exact items you've purchased, how often you wear those purchases, and (if I understood correctly) how your friends think you look in them.
Don't forget collecting a huge number of really well-framed, massively-metadata-tagged photos of peoples' otherwise-relatively-private bedrooms and closets.
I look forward to being denied a loan because people in my neighborhood have displayed increasingly-messy closets, indicating growing stress and probable imminent economic trouble among my neighbors, and they couldn't find any spy-photos of my closet so they're very sorry, but they can't make an exception because they can't second-guess the machine, only feed it more data.
Or, you know, all kinds of other horrible dark-future stuff that's increasingly part of our reality. Aside from the usual of making their constant psychological warfare (targeted advertising and marketing) more effective, which is bad enough.
In this case the real point of the depth-sensing camera hardware and machine-learning image analysis isn't hands-free selfies and robo-fashion advice. It's building a 3d model of your body to show what you would look like in different clothing, creating a clothes shopping experience that is competitive with shopping in person, and letting Amazon take on a big chunk of retail where it's not currently an appealing option.