Project Genie grounds generated worlds in Street View imagery
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- x.com
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Step into the map with the Street View grounding feature in Project Genie from @GoogleDeepmind and @GoogleLabs. Announced at I/O, this research prototype uses locations from @GoogleMaps Street View as a foundation, letting you generate and explore interactive, 360-degree virtual environments from just a text prompt or real-world starting place. Cool, right? But… How does it actually work? 🤔 As an experimental tool, Project Genie tackles the "blank space" problem (showing both what’s in front of the camera and behind it) by utilizing Street View data to realistically generate a 360-degree view of the location you selected as the starting point for your world to generate from. Worlds generated by Genie are far more dynamic and rich because they’re created frame-by-frame based on the world description and user actions. By predicting each subsequent frame, Genie is able to simulate what it looks like to swim across an ocean, or hike to the top of a peak, marking a massive shift in interactive media and simulation pipelines. What real-world place would you want to step into and explore?
Context
Project Genie can use a Street View location as the starting point for an interactive generated world. The research prototype from Google DeepMind and collaborators uses that imagery to establish a view around the chosen location, including directions behind the initial camera position. It then predicts subsequent frames from the world description and the user's actions. Mechanism described in the announcement.
Street View supplies a real-world starting reference; exploration proceeds through newly generated imagery. The project page describes an environment that expands as the user moves, making the feature a way to create and explore imagined continuations of a place.
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