We’ve all pulled up Street View on Google Maps to show a friend what our childhood home looked like, or dropped that little person icon onto the streets of Paris to see if we booked a hotel in a cool neighborhood. Imagine being able to do that, but in a more immersive, interactive way that allows you to really simulate the street and its environs, and even do things like adjust the weather or see what it would look like in a “Day After Tomorrow” scenario.
That’s one of the goals of Google’s latest integration. Starting today, Google DeepMind is connecting Street View to Project Genie, the company’s general-purpose world model that can generate diverse, interactive environments. The new feature launched during the Google I/O developer conference.
“It’s really powerful for both the agent [and robotics] use case and for humans to play with, and that’s always been the thesis of Genie,” Jack Parker-Holder, a research scientist on DeepMind’s open-endedness team, told TechCrunch.
He gave the example of a new robot being deployed in London, which rarely sees the sun. Genie could, Parker-Holder says, simulate those scarce occasions when the sun glints off the Victorian housing, so the rays don’t shock the robot when it happens.
