The Collaboration Enables Researchers to Advance Habitat, Facebook AI’s Simulation Platform for Research in Embodied AI, to Help Robots Better Understand and Interact With the Physical World.
Matterport, the spatial data company leading the digital transformation of the built world, which has entered into a definitive agreement to enter into a business combination with Gores Holdings VI (GHVI, GHVIU, and GHVIW), announced a collaboration with Facebook AI Research (FAIR) through which it will make the largest-ever dataset of 3D indoor spaces available exclusively for academic, non-commercial uses. The Habitat-Matterport 3D Research Dataset (HM3D) is an unprecedented collection of 1,000 high-resolution Matterport digital twins made up of residential, commercial, and civic spaces generated precisely from real-world environments. HM3D will play a significant role in advancing embodied AI research which seeks to teach robots and virtual AI assistants to understand and interact with the complexities of the physical world.
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“Until now, this rich spatial data has been glaringly absent in the field, so HM3D has the potential to change the landscape of embodied AI and 3D computer vision,” said Dhruv Batra, Research Scientist at Facebook AI Research. “Our hope is that the 3D dataset brings researchers closer to building intelligent machines, to do for embodied AI what pioneers before us did for 2D computer vision and other areas of AI.”
HM3D is free and available now for academic, non-commercial research. Researchers can use it with FAIR’s Habitat simulator to train embodied agents, such as home robots and AI assistants, at scale. HM3D is a foundational step towards helping these agents navigate through real-world environments and better understand the variations of spaces such as bedrooms, bathrooms, kitchen and hallways, as well as the different configurations of those rooms within every structure. It can also assist robots in recognizing how objects within rooms are typically arranged so that instructions are correctly understood. This research could one day be used in production applications like robots that can retrieve medicine from a bedroom nightstand or AR glasses that can help people remember where they left their keys.
“We are excited to collaborate with Facebook as we provide the academic and research communities access to this unique spatial dataset that is sure to impact how we work and live,” said Conway Chen, Vice President of Business Development and Alliances at Matterport. “With more than five million spaces captured with the Matterport platform, we are the only company that can offer a diverse library of high-resolution, data-rich digital twins of various styles, sizes, and complexities from across the world. HM3D can also be used more broadly by academia, and we can’t wait to see what innovations emerge.”
“We’ve been challenged with a lack of spatial data to advance innovation in real-estate, construction, robotics, augmented reality, and more. But with the HM3D dataset from the collaboration between Matterport and Facebook AI, we’re excited about the significant progress we’ll make in advancing research in indoor scene reconstruction, generation, and analysis at a house-scale for the first time,” said Yasutaka Furukawa, Associate Professor of Computing Science at Simon Fraser University.
Matterport has defined the spatial data category for the built world with its market-leading platform that transforms any physical space into an accurate and immersive digital twin, many industries leverage Matterport’s digital twins and spatial data insights to fundamentally change the way business is done. Real estate agents gain a deeper understanding of every property that gets digitized and gain the ability to see what is most important to thousands of prospective buyers. Retailers can digitize multiple stores at any point in time to track fixed assets and inventory. Developers and property owners can use Matterport to document every stage of construction and create a robust digital system of record over the entire lifecycle of the building. Matterport’s rapidly expanding developer platform makes it easy for partners and developers to create powerful new tools and draw new property insights, fueling industry-wide innovation that makes every space more valuable, accessible and useful.
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