Comment by alexgotoi
2 days ago
Apple dropping this is interesting. They've been quiet on the flashy AI stuff while everyone else is yelling about transformers, but 3D reconstruction from single images is actually useful hardware integration stuff.
What's weird is we're getting better at faking 3D from 2D than we are at just... capturing actual 3D data. Like we have LiDAR in phones already, but it's easier to neural-net your way around it than deal with the sensor data properly.
Five years from now we'll probably look back at this as the moment spatial computing stopped being about hardware and became mostly inference. Not sure if that's good or bad tbh.
Will include this one in my https://hackernewsai.com/ newsletter.
I wonder if humans are any different. We don't have LIDAR in our eyes but we approximate depth "enough" with only our 2D input
We also constantly move our heads and refocus our eyes. We can get a rough idea of depth from only a static stereo pair, but in reality we ingest vastly more information than that and constantly update our internal representation in real time.
We don't have 2d input, we have 3d input.
We have two eyes that gives us depth by default.