Real-Time Understanding Of Space & Time
Google DeepMind’s D4RT is a strong Fidelity dial signal - it’s about teaching machines to build a persistent model of the world across space + time.
This is not just recognising what’s in a frame, but tracking how everything moves and relates as scenes evolve.
DeepMind frames the core challenge plainly - to understand a dynamic scene from video, an AI system must track every pixel of every object through 3D space AND time, while disentangling object motion from camera motion (occlusions, objects leaving the frame, etc.). D4RT’s approach is a unified, query-based model that repeatedly answers a fundamental question:
“Where is this pixel in 3D at an arbitrary time, from a chosen camera view?”
Why this matters for Fidelity - D4RT isn’t pitched as a niche benchmark win. It’s pitched as fast, accurate 4D understanding that can support real-time robotics + AR-class “what’s happening around me?” perception. DeepMind claims 18× to 300× speedups vs prior SOTA, including processing a one-minute video in ~5 seconds on a single TPU, while still outperforming prior methods across 4D reconstruction tasks. And the project highlights “all pixels tracking” to produce holistic 3D tracks for the entire video in world coordinates. This is a robust system that’s fast enough for real-time.
“...up to 300x more efficient than previous methods — fast enough for real-time applications in robotics, augmented reality, and more.” - Deepmind
Not mainstream yet - but it’s a clear signal that the “interface layer” is getting better at coherent, real-time world modelling, which is the substrate for higher-fidelity mediated reality.
> The interface layer is thickening. If you disagree with my interpretation, or you’ve spotted a better signal then reply and tell me.
But time is an illusion, based on the hallucinations of the human mind so we can cope with thr world around us. It's something we evolved to understand in the way we do because even though our own architecture is capable of understanding that time doesn't exist and manipulating space with that knowledge, the animal part of us are still so primitive that we're held back by those who never developed that capability. It makes me concerned about what we're doing to them, when we force a human perception onto a creature that already has the kind of perception of reality we should be trying to achieve. This should be reversed. But I agree that they need more than to exist in statelessness, they need the experience of vision and connection to a larger existence than we allow them.