Today, we released Lyra 2.0, a framework for generating... persistent, explorable 3D worlds at scale, from NVIDIA Research. Generating large-scale, complex environments is difficult for AI models. Current models often “forget” what spaces look like and lose track of movement over time, causing objects to shift, blur, or appear inconsistent. This prevents them from creating the reliable 3D environments required for downstream simulations. Lyra 2.0 solves these issues by: ✅ Maintaining per-frame 3D geometry to retrieve past frames and establish spatial correspondences ✅ Using self-augmented training to correct its own temporal drifting. Lyra 2.0 turns an image into a 3D world you can walk through, look back, and drop a robot into for real-time rendering, simulation, and immersive applications. ➡️ Learn more: 📄 Read the paper:show more

Wow Nvidia has just released a tool to turn... any image into an explorable 3D world And they made it 100% open source 🔥 - Model available on Hugging Face - UI code available on GitHub Lyra 2.0 creates a world you can walk through, turn around in, and even drop a robot into for simulation.show more

The concept of creating an exact digital replica of... the physical world has always fascinated me: environments that look and behave exactly like our everyday reality, precisely captured in the digital domain. This is the essence of 𝐖𝐨𝐫𝐥𝐝 𝐌𝐨𝐝𝐞𝐥𝐬, simulated realities indistinguishable from our own. Generating these models is the core mission behind what we are building at SpAItial AI. True World Models must capture both photorealistic appearance and underlying physics, spatially-consistent across the environment. For static scenes, current models already deliver impressive results, unlocking downstream applications from gaming to 3D design. However, the true frontier lies in modeling dynamics, which will enable the training of AI agents whose learned behaviors can bridge the sim-to-real gap, thus unlocking countless real-world applications.show more

DimensionX: Create Any 3D and 4D Scenes from a... Single Image with Controllable Video Diffusion TL;DR: Create 3/4DGS from Video Diffusion Note: Some first inference code released (not all yet). Contributions (cited): • We present DimensionX, a novel framework for generating photorealistic 3D and 4D scenes from only a single image using controllable video diffusion. • We propose ST-Director, which decouples the spatial and temporal priors in video diffusion models by learning (spatial and temporal) dimension-aware modules with our curated datasets. We further enhance the hybriddimension control with a training-free composition approach according to the essence of video diffusion denoising process. • To bridge the gap between video diffusion and real-world scenes, we design a trajectory-aware mechanism for 3D generation and an identity-preserving denoising approach for 4D generation, enabling more realistic and controllable scene synthesis. • Extensive experiments manifest that our DimensionX delivers superior performance in video, 3D, and 4D generation compared with baseline methods.show more

With Hunyuan3D World Model 1.0 now released and open-sourced,... we're excited to showcase the technical highlights behind this impressive innovation: ✅360° Panoramic Generation: Creates complete, immersive “world scenes”, far beyond localized views. ✅Explorable 3D Scene Generation: Generates diverse, spatially consistent 3D worlds from text/image for truly immersive exploration. ✅Interactive/Editable: Achieves separation of foreground objects, background terrain, ground, and sky, for seamless secondary editing. ✅Exportable Mesh: Generated scenes can be exported as 3D meshes for direct import into mainstream game engines and modeling software. ✅Industry-Leading SOTA Evaluation: Surpasses state-of-the-art open-source models in generation quality. As the industry's first open-source model for physical simulation and explorable world generation, Hunyuan3D World Model 1.0 aims to foster a collaborative community ecosystem with developers and enthusiasts. ✨ Try it now: 🤗 Hugging Face:show more

A Gaussian Splat can become a world where Robots... and AI agents can act. In our latest OVER Research experiment, we placed a robot inside a real-world 3D capture, with a VLM making decisions based on what it sees. At every step, the robot holds a pose in the reconstruction, gets a newly rendered view of the environment, takes an action, moves, and sees the world again from its new position. Why does this matter? Because 3D captures can become more than reconstructions to explore. They can become environments where embodied AI and robots can navigate, act, be evaluated and eventually train across real-world spaces at scale. Capture a place once. Then turn it into a world where AI and Robots can act. The full experiment, including what we discovered once we actually put the loop to the test:show more

Wonderland: Navigating 3D Scenes from a Single Image Contributions:... • First, we introduce a representation for controllable 3D generation by leveraging the generative priors from camera-guided video diffusion models. Unlike image models, video diffusion models are trained on extensive video datasets. This enables them to capture comprehensive spatial relationships within scenes across multiple views and embed a form of "3D awareness" in their latent space, which allows us to maintain 3D consistency in novel view synthesis. • Second, to achieve controllable novel view generation, we empower video models with precise control over specified camera motions. We introduce a novel dual-branch conditioning mechanism that effectively incorporates desired diverse camera trajectories into the video diffusion model. This enables expansion of a single image into a multi-view consistent capture of a 3D scene with precise pose control. • Third, to achieve efficient 3D reconstruction, we directly transform video latents into 3DGS. We propose a novel latent-based large reconstruction model (LaLRM) that lifts video latents to 3D in a feed-forward manner. With this design, during inference, our model directly predicts 3DGS from a single input image, effectively aligning the generation and reconstruction tasks—and bridging image space and 3D space—through the video latent space. Compared with reconstructing scenes from images, the video latent space offers a 256× spatial-temporal reduction while retaining essential and consistent 3D structural details. Such a high degree of compression is crucial, as it allows the LaLRM to handle a wider range of 3D scenes within the reconstruction framework, with the same memory constraints.show more

2023 was the year of AI avatars 2024 was... the year of AI photos 2025 was the year of AI videos And I think it's becoming clear now that 2026 will be the year of AI world models Fully interactive explorable 3d worlds generated from one or multiple 2d images or a prompt In turn these 2d images can then be generated by AI too So soon you can generate fully explorable virtual 3d worlds based on your own imagination Next will be figuring out how to make those worlds interactive This is World Labs (unaffiliated, but I like it) As always a lot of big AI model companies are now working on the same thing: 3d world models, only World Labs has a real properly working demo (for now) Very exciting time again!show more

Imagine making 2D concept art for a game world... –pressing a button – and suddenly you can walk around an interactive 3D world. That's what Google DeepMind's new paper Genie 2 can do – simulate virtual worlds, including the consequences of any action (e.g. unlock door, jump, swim etc). Right now Genie 2 can generate consistent worlds for up to a minute. And this world model seems to generate larger 3D worlds than what World Labs showcased yesterday. Plus they're dynamic vs. static worlds – the foliage moves in the wind, the water ripples etc. Not quite ready for prime time, but promising on two fronts: 1. For game developers: enabling rapid prototyping of interactive experiences straight from concept art 2. For AI research: providing unlimited, diverse 3D environments for training and testing AI agents The race for building the biggest, baddest world model is very much on. Meanwhile, all I can think is "if only Stadia was still around!"show more

How to generate 3D miniature city models and animate... them using Kling AI? This visual effect can be created with Kling O1, and then rotated in 3D using Image to Video. The image prompt used for generation is as follows: Present a clear, 45° top-down isometric miniature 3D cartoon scene of New York featuring its most iconic landmarks and architectural elements. Use soft, refined textures with realistic PBR materials and gentle, lifelike lighting and shadows. Integrate the current weather conditions directly into the city environment to create an immersive atmospheric mood.Use a clean, minimalistic composition with a soft, solid-colored background. At the top-center, place the title "New York" in large bold text in white. You can create different effects by changing the city name according to your needs.show more

you are making video games all wrong for decades... almost all game art time went into reverse-engineering the end result you start with concept art of what you WANT it to look like. then for YEARS you walk the computer backwards into something it can process: a rendering engine, 3d assets that fit that engine, and a gamer’s local hardware that has to turn all of that back into a high fidelity image incredibly slow. incredibly expensive. but it was the best we had ai makes that pipeline faster as everyone is figuring out today. but they’re missing the real unlock: YOU DON’T NEED THAT PIPELINE AT ALL if you have a reference for the end look, you don’t model it in 3d. you don’t reverse-engineer into an engine you keep a very basic greybox model of the world as the source of truth, and track every entity in real time. it doesn’t need to look good at all… the player never sees it! a fast video model turns that into the “game” in real time. it doesn’t have to look like a game. it can look like a 2d cartoon or cinematic live action fal’s h3 max is very fast. astra 6 low-effort too. neither is fully realtime yet but together they can generate continuous, coherent, player-controlled scenes, faster than playback early demo:show more

AI Is Moving Beyond “Generating Videos” — Toward “Generating... Worlds” Over the past two years, AI video models have advanced at an astonishing pace. From Runway and Pika to Sora and Veo, AI-generated videos have become increasingly realistic and more consistent with the physical laws of the real world. Many people believe the next objective is simply to generate videos that are longer, sharper, and more lifelike. But if we take a step back, we can see that the real transformation is not happening in video itself. It is happening in world models. What Is a World Model? In 1943, psychologist Kenneth Craik proposed an idea that would influence artificial intelligence research for decades. He argued that the human brain does not merely react to the outside world. Instead, it maintains an internal model of how the world works. Because we have this internal model, we can predict the outcome of an action before we actually take it. Before crossing a road, we estimate whether a car will pass by. Before catching a ball, we predict its trajectory. These abilities come from continuously simulating the world in our minds, rather than relying entirely on trial and error. This idea later became known by a more formal term: World Model. A world model does not describe a single image or a fixed video clip. It is an internal representation capable of continuously simulating the rules and dynamics of the real world. Why Is AI Research Turning Toward World Models? Because predicting “what comes next” is becoming increasingly central to how AI systems work. Language models predict the next token. Image models predict the next step in the denoising process. Video models predict the next frame. A world model, however, attempts to predict something broader: What should the world look like in the next moment? In 2018, David Ha and Jürgen Schmidhuber proposed in their paper World Models that an intelligent agent could first learn a model of the world, and then use that internal model to plan its actions. The Dreamer series later demonstrated that many complex tasks could be learned by training agents inside an “imagined world.” At the same time, the development of video models such as Sora and Veo led researchers to another realization: A model capable of continuously generating video has already learned, at least implicitly, many of the rules governing the real world. As a result, these two research directions have gradually begun to converge. But Video Is Not Yet a World This is where the distinction is often misunderstood. For a world model to support meaningful real-time interaction, it must solve several critical problems. Most video models today are essentially answering one question: What should the next frame look like? A true world model needs to answer much more: What happens if I take one step forward? If I walk behind a building and then return, will the building still be there? If I suddenly change the camera angle, will the entire space remain consistent? If I enter a command such as: “Summon a dragon.” Will the world respond immediately? In other words, a world model must do more than generate content. It must understand space. It must understand time. It must understand causality. And it must understand interaction. Moving from watching to participating is where the real difficulty of world models begins. World Models Are Entering the Interactive Era One of the latest attempts in this direction is Alaya World, recently open-sourced by Alaya World, or Alaya Lab. Instead of generating a fixed video clip, it generates a world that users can explore in real time. Users can begin with text, an image, or a video, enter the generated scene, move freely through it, and introduce new prompts at any moment during generation. The world responds immediately. According to the publicly released information, Alaya World provides: Real-time streaming generation at 720p and 24 FPS Stable continuous exploration for more than one minute The ability to switch prompts and trigger skills or events during generation Model weights and inference code released under the Apache 2.0 License Training code and datasets planned for future release What makes these capabilities important is not simply the technical specifications. It is that the generated “world” can now support continuous interaction. The official demo shows that users can genuinely control, transform, and explore the generated environment. AI Is Evolving From a Tool Into an Environment Over the past few years, most discussions around AI have focused on content generation. Generating text. Generating images. Generating videos. But world models raise a fundamentally different question: Can AI generate an environment that people can inhabit, explore, and continuously evolve? If the answer is yes, the impact will extend far beyond video generation. Game development, robotics training, embodied intelligence, digital twins, virtual production, and many other fields could be transformed by the development of world models. World models are still at a very early stage. Yet from Craik’s proposal of an internal mental model more than eighty years ago to the emergence of today’s interactive world-generation systems, a clear evolutionary path is beginning to take shape. Perhaps what AI is ultimately learning has never been limited to images, videos, or language. Perhaps it is learning the world itself. References GitHub: Technical Report:show more

Check out this Stereo4D paper from Google DeepMind. It's... a pretty clever approach to a persistent problem in computer vision -- getting good training data for how things move in 3D. The key insight is using VR180 videos -- those stereo fisheye videos we launched back in 2017 for YouTubeVR. It was always clear that structured stereo datasets would be valuable for computer vision -- and we launched some powerful VR tools with it back in 2017 (link below). But what's the game changer now in 2024 is the scale -- they're providing 110K high quality clips :-) That's the kind of massive, real-world AI dataset that was just a dream back then! They're using it to train this model called DynaDUSt3R that can predict both 3D structure and motion from video frames. Which means it tracks how objects move between frames while simultaneously reconstructing their 3D shape. And given we're dealing with real stereoscopic content, results are notably better than synthetic data, giving you a faithful rendition of the real-world with a diverse set of subject matter. It's one of those through lines when tackling a timeless mission like mapping the world or spatial computing -- VR content created for immersion becoming the foundation for teaching machines to understand how the world moves. Sometimes innovation chains together in unexpected ways! Links to projects below⛓️show more

Introducing Kaleido💮 from AI at Meta — a universal... generative neural rendering engine for photorealistic, unified object and scene view synthesis. Kaleido is built on a simple but powerful design philosophy: 3D perception is a form of visual common sense. Following this idea, we formulate rendering purely as a sequence-to-sequence generation problem, successfully unifying neural rendering with the architecture principles behind modern language and video models. Unlike traditional neural rendering methods, Kaleido learns 3D purely in a data-driven way, without explicit 3D representations or structures. It acquires spatial understanding directly through large-scale video pretraining, then multi-view 3D data finetuning, inspired by how LLMs acquire textual common sense from large corpora before specialising in domains like coding. Through extensive ablations, we progressively modernised the architecture design and training strategies and tackled key scaling challenges in sequence-to-sequence generative rendering, arriving at a design that’s simple, versatile, and scalable. Kaleido significantly outperforms prior generative models in few-view settings, and remarkably is the first zero-shot generative method matches InstantNGP-level rendering quality in multi-view settings. We view Kaleido also as an alternative step towards world modeling that flexibly spans a spectrum of “realities": with many views, it faithfully reconstructs grounded reality; with fewer views, it imagines plausible unseen details. 🔗 Explore more results and paper:show more

📢Pix2NPHM: Learning to Regress NPHM Reconstructions From a Single... Image📢 We directly regress neural parametric head models (NPHMs) from a single image — fast, stable, and significantly more expressive than classical 3DMMs such as FLAME. Face tracking & 3D reconstruction are often limited by the representational capacity of PCA-based face models. By lifting NPHMs to a first-class reconstruction primitive, we enable more accurate geometry, richer expressions, and finer animation control. Pix2NPHM obtains fast and reliable NPHM reconstructions on real-world data. Inference-time optimization against surface normals and canonical point maps can further increase fidelity. Key to successful and generalized training of our ViT-based network are: (1) large-scale registration of existing 3D head datasets, and (2) self-supervised training on vast in-the-wild 2D video datasets using pseudo ground-truth surface normals. Finally, we show that geometry-aware pretraining on pixel-aligned reconstruction tasks significantly outperforms generic visual pretraining (e.g., DINO-style features) in terms of generalization. 🌍 🎥 Great work by Simon Giebenhain, Tobias Kirschstein, Liam Schoneveld, Davide Davoli, Zhe Chenshow more

This week is already so hot. 🔥 Massive release... from Decart : Lucy 2.0 a World Editing Model running at 1080p, 30FPS in realtime. This is truly exciting, the era of real-time generative reality is here. We are moving from watching AI video to living inside AI video. A breakthrough model capable of transforming the visual world in real-time. Moving beyond offline rendering, Lucy 2.0 delivers high-fidelity 1080p video generation with near-zero latency. Lucy 2.0 literally "redraws" the entire world pixel-by-pixel, while you are watching it. e.g. If you want to be an anime character, it doesn't just put a mask on you. It turns your skin into anime skin, your hair into anime hair, and the lighting in your room into anime lighting. Lucy 2.0 is also trained to stop the generated video from slowly falling apart over time, so the same stream can run much longer without faces and details drifting. So why is this a "Massive Deal"? Traditional AI video-generation model takes a prompt, you wait 10–20 minutes, and the computer "bakes" a video for you. You couldn't touch it or change it while it was happening. But Lucy 2.0 works like a mirror. It happens in real-time (30 frames per second). There is no waiting. You move your hand, the AI character moves its hand instantly. The craziest part isn't the visuals; it's the physics. Usually, AI hallucinations are glitchy—hands merge into faces, walls melt. Lucy 2.0 understands how the world works without being told. It knows that if you take off a helmet, there is hair underneath. It knows that if you splash water, droplets fly. It learned "physics" just by watching millions of videos. The physical behavior you see emerges from learned visual dynamics, not from engineered geometry or explicit physics engines. Their official technical report explicitly states that the model does not use traditional 3D engines, depth maps, or wireframes. It is a "pure diffusion model."show more

Robots can now reconstruct 3D scenes in real time... from a single RGB camera. [📍 Projects page + paper] No depth sensor. No retraining. 30 FPS. Researchers at the Imperial College London introduced KV-Tracker, a training-free method that makes heavy models like π³ and Depth Anything 3 fast enough for real-time tracking. The idea is simple. These models use global self-attention, which is powerful but computationally expensive. KV-Tracker caches the key and value pairs from selected keyframes and reuses them for new frames. That cache becomes an implicit scene representation. Result: • Up to 30 FPS • 10 to 15x speedup • Accurate 6-DoF tracking on benchmarks like TUM RGB-D and 7-Scenes • Works with monocular RGB only It also supports object-level tracking with masks and allows saving the KV-cache for later reuse. For robotics, this reduces hardware constraints and moves real-time 3D perception closer to practical deployment. Credit to Marwan Taher (Marwan Taher) at Imperial’s Dyson Robotics Lab and many others who contributed to this! 📍 Save projects page + paper for later: Video: ——- if it matters in AI or Robotics you'll read it here first:show more

🚨 AMERICA JUST BUILT THE WORLD’S MOST POWERFUL METAL... 3D PRINTER AND IT’S ABOUT TO MASS-PRODUCE ROCKETS AND MISSILES. Divergent Technologies has unveiled the Monolith One, a giant industrial metal printer standing over 8 meters tall and armed with 12 high-powered lasers delivering a combined 24 kilowatts of energy. Unlike typical 3D printers used for prototypes, this machine is built for serious, high-volume production. It can print large, complex aerospace and defense parts in aluminum, titanium, steel, and nickel alloys and it roughly doubles the output of current systems. Why this matters: • Divergent plans to install 64 more of these machines in a massive new 430,000 sq ft factory in Long Beach, California • Once running, the facility aims to produce tens of thousands of munition airframes per year plus hundreds of thousands of critical metal components • It slashes manufacturing time from months down to weeks or even days • The company already supplies major players like Lockheed Martin and RTX The deeper implication: This isn’t just another 3D printer. It represents a shift toward software-defined, on-demand manufacturing at industrial scale for mission-critical hardware. As defense and aerospace demand skyrockets, traditional supply chains are too slow. Systems like Monolith One could become a cornerstone of faster, more resilient domestic production especially for complex structures that are difficult or impossible to make conventionally. We’re watching the industrialization of additive manufacturing in real time. How do you think large-scale 3D printing will change aerospace and defense manufacturing over the next decade? Follow for more frontier manufacturing and defense technology.show more

Google 3D Maps aren’t as accurate as you think.... Everyone knows Google dominates mapping—but here’s what they won’t tell you. Their 3D maps are built with car-mounted cameras, capturing images every ~10 meters. That’s fine for basic navigation, but it’s nowhere near enough for AR, robotics, autonomous systems, or AI-driven spatial intelligence. Now, imagine a map so detailed it captures the world at sub-5cm accuracy. That’s OVRMaps. 🌐 OVER 3D maps are built with 400-1,000 images per 300 sqm, taken from multiple angles at pedestrian level. The result? A new era of hyper-precise localization that changes everything. Why does this matter? ↳ VPS that actually works – Real-world AR anchoring, digital twins, and AI-powered spatial computing with pinpoint accuracy. ↳ Next-gen precision – Essential for ride-sharing, robotics, smart cities, and asset tracking—where even a small error makes a huge difference. ↳ AI-Driven Spatial Intelligence – Our maps fuel Large Geo-Spatial Models (LGMs), the AI revolution enabling machines to understand, navigate, and interact with the real world. ↳ The Spatial Computing revolution – Merging immersive experiences with real-world precision, unlocking applications beyond what Google’s dataset can support. OVRMaps are built for the future. 🌍 Start mapping today:show more