https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/14/ai-edges-closer-to-understanding-3d-space-the-way-we-do/

If I show you single picture of a room, you can tell me right away that there’s a table with a chair in front of it, they’re probably about the same size, about this far from each other, with the walls this far away — enough to draw a rough map of the room. Computer vision systems don’t have this intuitive understanding of space, but the latest research from DeepMind brings them closer than ever before.

The new paper from the Google -owned research outfit was published today in the journal Science (complete with news item). It details a system whereby a neural network, knowing practically nothing, can look at one or two static 2D images of a scene and reconstruct a reasonably accurate 3D representation of it. We’re not talking about going from snapshots to full 3D images (Facebook’s working on that) but rather replicating the intuitive and space-conscious way that all humans view and analyze the world.