Why look at reality when you can edit what you see in real time?

The adoption of augmented reality is happening slowly but surely, and it’s easy to see one possible future for the technology: hardware that lets you edit what you see in real time, replacing objects around you with virtual overlays. Call it mixed reality, to be more precise.

Recent research from the AI team at Porsche (yes, the carmakers — we’ll get to that in a bit) shows how this might work. The team has built an AI system dubbed TransforMR that detects objects like cars and people, removes them, then replaces them with CGI alternatives in real-time. The end results are hardly flawless (edits are haphazard and the CGI models look like they were borrowed from 3D Movie Maker) but the concept is striking. It’s not hard to imagine...

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