Facebook and Matterport collaborate on realistic virtual training environments for AI

To train a robot to navigate a house, you either need to give it a lot of real time in a lot of real houses, or a lot of virtual time in a lot of virtual houses. The latter is definitely the better option, and Facebook and Matterport are working together to make thousands of virtual, interactive digital twins of real spaces available for researchers and their voracious young AIs.
On Facebook’s side the big advance is in two parts: the new Habitat 2.0 training environment and the dataset th