Facebook has recently announced the creation of AI Habitat, an open-source artificial intelligence (AI) simulation platform that creates photo-realistic 3D environments for use in embodied AI. Along with this announcement, the company shared Republica, a data-set of hyperrealistic, 3D reconstructions of a staged apartment, retail store, and other indoor spaces that can be used with AI Habitat (though other data sets can be used, as well). The two can be seen working together in the video above, and are available now on Github.
“Our goal in sharing AI Habitat,” reads the announcement post on Facebook’s Artificial Intelligence blog, “is to provide the most universal simulator to date for embodied research, with an open, modular design that’s both powerful and flexible enough to bring reproducibility and standardized benchmarks to this subfield.”
For those not in the know, embodied AI allows bots to create categories for objects, such as “book,” “door,” or “brown,” meaning that they can “see” objects more easily, and understand what we mean when we describe or inter act with them. These toolsets could be revolutionary to virtual reality (VR) in particular, and extended reality (XR) as a whole. Being able to not only recreate a physical space in XR, but make digital copies of every object within it that space – ones that AI better understand when we interact with them – could be a game changer for our industry.
“To our knowledge, [Republica] contains the most photo-realistic 3D reconstructions of environments available,” the announcement went on. “This level of detail narrows the training gap between virtual and physical spaces, which we believe is important for transferring the skills learned in simulation to the real world.”
We have covered ways that AI can interact with XR in the past, such as when JD.com, one of China’s largest e-commerce companies, used AR and AI to increase online orders by 9.6%. Imagine how much further these two technologies can go together now with these steps forward in innovation.
