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