DeepMind's AI can 'imagine' a world based on a single picture

Artificial intelligence can now put itself in someone else's shoes. DeepMind has developed a neural network that taught itself to'imagine' a scene from different viewpoints, based on just a single image. Given a 2D picture of a scene – say, a room with a brick wall, and a brightly coloured sphere and cube on the floor – the neural network can generate a 3D view from a different vantage point, rendering the opposite sides of the objects and altering where shadows fall to maintain the same light source. The system, called the Generative Query Network (GQN), can tease out details from the static images to guess at spatial relationships, including the camera's position. "Imagine you're looking at Mt. Everest, and you move a metre – the mountain doesn't change size, which tells you something about its distance from you,"says Ali Eslami who led the project at Deepmind. "But if you look at a mug, it would change position.