Comment by wongarsu

"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/