Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

trick van treat @derek.bike · Jul 30

good morning

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Andrew Davison @ajdavison.bsky.social · Jul 23

For those watching in black and white, the blue is behind the brown...

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Andrew Davison @ajdavison.bsky.social · Jul 22

I've been a Tamiya RC fan since owning and loving a Grasshopper in the 80s, and more recently built one or their RC kits with each of my kids (Hornet, LunchBox and Midnight Pumpkin!)

Matt Alt @mattalt.bsky.social · Jul 22

RIP Shunsaku Tamiya, age 90, the chairman of legendary modelmaker Tamiya. He didn't found the company, but started working there in 1958, just four years after its founding, and helped it shift from its original line of wooden models into the plastic kits it is so well known for today.

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Matt Alt @mattalt.bsky.social · Jul 22

RIP Shunsaku Tamiya, age 90, the chairman of legendary modelmaker Tamiya. He didn't found the company, but started working there in 1958, just four years after its founding, and helped it shift from its original line of wooden models into the plastic kits it is so well known for today.

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Andrew Davison @ajdavison.bsky.social · Jun 13

Live Demo of MASt3R-SLAM this afternoon in the demo session at #CVPR2025.

Eric Dexheimer @ericdexheimer.bsky.social · Feb 25

We’ve had fun testing the limits of MASt3R-SLAM on in-the-wild videos. Here’s the drone video of a Minnesota bowling alley that we’ve always wanted to reconstruct! Different scene scales, dynamic objects, specular surfaces, and fast motion.

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Andrew Davison @ajdavison.bsky.social · May 16

Full draft of the SLAM Handbook now released --- available as a free PDF, with a printed version coming soon. Now including Part 3, "From SLAM to Spatial AI" (I knew it would catch on eventually), with contributions from @hidematsu82.bsky.social and me.
#SpatialAI

github.com/SLAM-Handboo...

GitHub - SLAM-Handbook-contributors/slam-handbook-public-release: Release repo for our SLAM Handbook

Release repo for our SLAM Handbook. Contribute to SLAM-Handbook-contributors/slam-handbook-public-release development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

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Andrew Davison @ajdavison.bsky.social · Apr 30

Great diagram.

Brent Toderian @brenttoderian.bsky.social · Apr 29

This is interesting — a recent study of mode share (the % share of transportation trips by car, transit, walking, biking etc) relative to city size and income levels in almost 800 cities in 61 countries. Interesting results. HT @davidzipper.bsky.social
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Graphic showing where various cities are placed relative to whether everyone walks their cycles, everyone uses public transit, or everyone drives.

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Brent Toderian @brenttoderian.bsky.social · Apr 29

This is interesting — a recent study of mode share (the % share of transportation trips by car, transit, walking, biking etc) relative to city size and income levels in almost 800 cities in 61 countries. Interesting results. HT @davidzipper.bsky.social
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

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Kevin Edwards ( Retro Videogame development ) @kevedwardsretro.bsky.social · Apr 26

It's 3PM. Exactly 40 years ago the first ARM processor was powered up. It worked. To mark the occasion, a bottle of champagne was opened and the time and date was written on the bottle - by Sophie Wilson IIRC. I hope today another bottle is opened to celebrate the anniversary.

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Andrew Davison @ajdavison.bsky.social · Apr 9

Great look at back at 2D scrolling methods in games.

Itay Keren @untame.com · Nov 15

Hard to believe that a decade ago, in preparation for the release of my game, I spent a month researching 2D cameras by playing through all my favorite 80s classics.
If you haven't yet, check out this fun, GIF-heavy paper!
docs.google.com/document/d/e...

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Andrew Davison @ajdavison.bsky.social · Apr 5

Slow motion Galton Board.
Love that Gaussian!

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Andrew Davison @ajdavison.bsky.social · Apr 2

We were fortunate to have Jianyuan visit us at Imperial yesterday, and he gave a brilliant and thoughtful talk about 3D geometry and learning. Maybe every 6--12 months or so there is a paper in my area which really seems like something new and important, and VGGT is one of those!

Jianyuan Wang @jianyuanwang.bsky.social · Mar 17

Introducing VGGT (CVPR'25), a feedforward Transformer that directly infers all key 3D attributes from one, a few, or hundreds of images, in seconds!

Project Page: vgg-t.github.io
Code & Weights: github.com/facebookrese...

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Andrew Davison @ajdavison.bsky.social · Mar 24

Should be good!

Matthias Niessner @niessner.bsky.social · Mar 23

Tomorrow in our TUM AI - Lecture Series we'll have Andrea Tagliasacchi (@taiyasaki.bsky.social), SFU.

He'll talk about "𝐑𝐚𝐝𝐢𝐚𝐧𝐭 𝐅𝐨𝐚𝐦: 𝐑𝐞𝐚𝐥-𝐓𝐢𝐦𝐞 𝐃𝐢𝐟𝐟𝐞𝐫𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐢𝐚𝐛𝐥𝐞 𝐑𝐚𝐲 𝐓𝐫𝐚𝐜𝐢𝐧𝐠".

Live Stream: youtube.com/live/1u7ahb9...

5pm GMT+1 / 9am PST (Mon Mar 24th)

TUM AI Lecture Series - Radiant Foam: Real-Time Differentiable Ray Tracing (Andrea Tagliasacchi)

YouTube video by Matthias Niessner

youtube.com

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Matthias Niessner @niessner.bsky.social · Mar 23

Tomorrow in our TUM AI - Lecture Series we'll have Andrea Tagliasacchi (@taiyasaki.bsky.social), SFU.

He'll talk about "𝐑𝐚𝐝𝐢𝐚𝐧𝐭 𝐅𝐨𝐚𝐦: 𝐑𝐞𝐚𝐥-𝐓𝐢𝐦𝐞 𝐃𝐢𝐟𝐟𝐞𝐫𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐢𝐚𝐛𝐥𝐞 𝐑𝐚𝐲 𝐓𝐫𝐚𝐜𝐢𝐧𝐠".

Live Stream: youtube.com/live/1u7ahb9...

5pm GMT+1 / 9am PST (Mon Mar 24th)

TUM AI Lecture Series - Radiant Foam: Real-Time Differentiable Ray Tracing (Andrea Tagliasacchi)

YouTube video by Matthias Niessner

youtube.com

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Andrew Davison @ajdavison.bsky.social · Mar 20

Remember: the route to Spatial AI is through SLAM. Key research topics are representations for real-time fusion of measurements and priors into persistent semantic/metric scene models; and algorithm/hardware co-design for 1000X efficiency. #SpatialAI
arxiv.org/abs/1803.11288

FutureMapping: The Computational Structure of Spatial AI Systems

We discuss and predict the evolution of Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping (SLAM) into a general geometric and semantic `Spatial AI' perception capability for intelligent embodied devices. A big ga...

arxiv.org

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Jianyuan Wang @jianyuanwang.bsky.social · Mar 17

Introducing VGGT (CVPR'25), a feedforward Transformer that directly infers all key 3D attributes from one, a few, or hundreds of images, in seconds!

Project Page: vgg-t.github.io
Code & Weights: github.com/facebookrese...

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Chris Offner @chrisoffner3d.bsky.social · Mar 16

On the tram station video, VGGT fails entirely, whereas MASt3R-SLAM had done a more reasonable (albeit also not stellar) job.

bsky.app/profile/chri...

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Chris Offner @chrisoffner3d.bsky.social · Mar 16

Visual Geometry Grounded Transformer (VGGT) predicts cameras, point maps, depth maps, and point tracks for up to hundreds of images in less than a second on a H100 GPU.

github.com/facebookrese...

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Andrew Davison @ajdavison.bsky.social · Mar 11

youtu.be/JYqfVE-fykk?...

Washington's Dream - SNL

YouTube video by Saturday Night Live

youtu.be

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Andrew Davison @ajdavison.bsky.social · Mar 11

200 hours of play in I am still addicted to Balatro!

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Andrew Davison @ajdavison.bsky.social · Mar 5

Cool to see this.

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Andrew Davison @ajdavison.bsky.social · Mar 2

If you like word puzzles, Bracket City is really cool:
bracket.city
The clues are cleverly nested in a way that looks like Lisp code!

(Via the @recomendo.bsky.social weekly newsletter.)

Bracket City

come visit bracket city

bracket.city

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Andrew Davison @ajdavison.bsky.social · Mar 1

Many interesting tests of MASt3R-SLAM on prerecorded videos.

Chris Offner @chrisoffner3d.bsky.social · Feb 27

I tried MASt3R-SLAM on this challenging sequence but it struggles. I'll have to see whether I can get it to produce better results on this one.

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Andrew Davison @ajdavison.bsky.social · Feb 28

Aria Gen 2 is very impressive, with fully onboard SLAM and various other perception all within a 75g device with an hours-long battery life. Processing on custom silicon. Congrats to the Reality Labs team.

Introducing Aria Gen 2: Unlocking New Research in Machine Perception, Contextual AI, Robotics, and More

Today, we're excited to announce the next step in the Project Aria journey: the introduction of Aria Gen 2 research glasses.

www.meta.com

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Andrew Davison @ajdavison.bsky.social · Feb 27

!

Chris Offner @chrisoffner3d.bsky.social · Feb 27

I tried MASt3R-SLAM on this challenging sequence but it struggles. I'll have to see whether I can get it to produce better results on this one.

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Andrew Davison @ajdavison.bsky.social · Feb 25

Shawshank Prison reconstructed with MASt3R-SLAM... from one of the best films ever.

Eric Dexheimer @ericdexheimer.bsky.social · Feb 25

Here's a reconstruction of a movie establishing shot

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Andrew Davison @ajdavison.bsky.social · Feb 25

I remember seeing this drone video a few years ago and thinking "we'll never run SLAM on that".... but here it is, complete with dense reconstruction (single camera, unknown calibration, no IMU). MASt3R-SLAM is absurdly robust.

Eric Dexheimer @ericdexheimer.bsky.social · Feb 25

We’ve had fun testing the limits of MASt3R-SLAM on in-the-wild videos. Here’s the drone video of a Minnesota bowling alley that we’ve always wanted to reconstruct! Different scene scales, dynamic objects, specular surfaces, and fast motion.

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Eric Dexheimer @ericdexheimer.bsky.social · Feb 25

Here's a reconstruction of a movie establishing shot

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Eric Dexheimer @ericdexheimer.bsky.social · Feb 25

We’ve had fun testing the limits of MASt3R-SLAM on in-the-wild videos. Here’s the drone video of a Minnesota bowling alley that we’ve always wanted to reconstruct! Different scene scales, dynamic objects, specular surfaces, and fast motion.

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