This paper introduces a large-scale multi-modal dataset captured in and around well-known landmarks in Oxford using a custom-built multi-sensor perception unit as well as a millimetre-accurate map from a Terrestrial LiDAR Scanner (TLS). The perception unit includes three synchronised global shutter colour cameras, an automotive 3D LiDAR scanner, and an inertial sensor - all precisely calibrated. We also establish benchmarks for tasks involving localisation, reconstruction, and novel-view synthesis, which enable the evaluation of Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping (SLAM) methods, Structure-from-Motion (SfM) and Multi-view Stereo (MVS) methods as well as radiance field methods such as Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) and 3D Gaussian Splatting. To evaluate 3D reconstruction the TLS 3D models are used as ground truth. Localisation ground truth is computed by registering the mobile LiDAR scans to the TLS 3D models. Radiance field methods are evaluated not only with poses sampled from the input trajectory, but also from viewpoints that are from trajectories which are distant from the training poses. Our evaluation demonstrates a key limitation of state-of-the-art radiance field methods: we show that they tend to overfit to the training poses/images and do not generalise well to out-of-sequence poses. They also underperform in 3D reconstruction compared to MVS systems using the same visual inputs. Our dataset and benchmarks are intended to facilitate better integration of radiance field methods and SLAM systems. The raw and processed data, along with software for parsing and evaluation, can be accessed at https://dynamic.robots.ox.ac.uk/datasets/oxford-spires/.

Sir Winston Churchill's birthplace, Blenheim Palace, is experimenting with a five-foot tall robot tour guide, called Betty. The autonomous robot is the latest in a series of tech advances in the grand stately home. Betty is designed to seek out visitors to provide information and answer their questions. It even takes selfies with visitors and can upload them to social media using the Twitter hashtag #bettyinthepalace. New addition: Blenheim Palace's new robotic tour guide wanders the halls of the stately home.

The Brothers Grimm have been dead more than 150 years, but they recently released a new story with a little help from artificial intelligence. The Princess and the Fox was created after a group of writers, artists and developers used a programme inspired by predictive text on phones to scan the collected stories of the Brothers Grimm to suggest words and similar phrases. Human writers then took over, to help shape the AI's algorithmic suggestions into the latest Grimm fairytale. The new tale tells the story of a talking fox who helps a lowly miller's son rescue a beautiful princess from the fate of having to marry a horrible prince she does not love. But here's the thing, the Brothers Grimm didn't actually write their fairytales in the first place.