It makes me think that maybe our visual perception is similar to what this program is doing in some ways.

I wonder if there are any computer vision projects that take a similar world emulation approach?

Imagine you collected the depth data also.

Yes the model is a U-Net, which is a type of Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), which is inspired by the structure of the visual cortex.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convolutional_neural_network#H...