Comment by navaed01
14 hours ago
Conversation about ‘players are the product’ of Pokémon go aside… What are some practical applications of an LGM?
Seems like navigation is ‘solved’? There’s already a lot of technology supporting permanence of virtual objects based on spatial mapping? Better AI generated animations?
I am sure there are a ton of innovations it could unlock…
"It could help with search and rescue" jokes aside [1] this seems really useful for robotics. Their demo video is estimating a camera position from a single image, after learning the scene from a couple images. Stick the camera on a robot, and you are now estimating where the robot is based on what the robot has seen before.
They are a bit vague on what else the model does, but it sounds like they extrapolate what the rest of the environment could look like, the same way you can make a good guess what the back side of that rock would look like. That gives autonomous robots a baseline they can use to plan actions (like how to drive/fly/crawl to the other side) that can be updated as new view points become available.
1: https://www.xkcd.com/2128/
I hope this tech could help make AR glasses more useful in public, day-to-day life, like a video game HUD.