Teaching AI to perceive the world through your eyes

AI that understands the world from a first-person point of view could unlock a new era of immersive experiences, as devices like augmented reality (AR) glasses and virtual reality (VR) headsets become as useful in everyday life as smartphones. Imagine your AR device displaying exactly how to hold the sticks during a drum lesson, guiding you through a recipe, helping you find your lost keys, or recalling memories as holograms that come to life in front of you. To build these new technologies, we need to teach AI to understand and interact with the world like we do, from a first-person perspective -- commonly referred to in the research community as egocentric perception. Today's computer vision (CV) systems, however, typically learn from millions of photos and videos that are captured in third-person perspective, where the camera is just a spectator to the action. "Next-generation AI systems will need to learn from an entirely different kind of data -- videos that show the world from the center of the action, rather than the sidelines," says Kristen Grauman, lead research scientist at Facebook.