Facebook researchers are building virtual spaces to improve AI and AR

Facebook created a new open platform for embodied AI research called AI Habitat, while Facebook Reality Labs (which up until last year was Oculus Research) released a dataset of photorealistic sample spaces it's calling Replica. Both Habitat and Replica are now available for researchers to download on Github. With these tools, researchers can train AI bots to act, see, talk, reason and plan simultaneously. The Replica data set is made of 18 different sample spaces, including a living room, conference room and two-story house. By training an AI bot to respond to a command like "bring my keys" in a Replica 3D simulation of a living room, researchers hope someday it can do the same with physical robots in a real-life living room.