china is not slowing down and this one is insane..
Chinese researchers just open-sourced SLAM3R, it rebuilds a full 3D scene from a single regular video, in real time. no LiDAR, no depth sensor, no camera rig. one phone-grade video in, a 3D world out.
> runs at 20+ FPS on a single GPU
> monocular RGB, just walk around filming
> feedforward neural net, no slow pose-optimization step
> beats optimization-based methods on reconstruction benchmarks
> handles long walkthroughs without drifting apart
what makes this work: older methods solve for camera position frame by frame, which is why they're slow. SLAM3R skips that and regresses the 3D geometry directly. that's how it hits real time.
100% free and open source: