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Rigid Body Physics and Collisions
Unity's built-in physics engine (PhysX) handles rigid body physics including the collisions between rigid bodies.
API commands can alter the physics time step to balance the accuracy of physics behavior against real-time performance, or modify behavior by adjusting mass, friction, etc. per-object at runtime.
NVidia Flex Uniform Particle Representation
Flex uses a uniform particle-based object representation that allows rigid bodies, soft bodies, cloth objects and fluids to interact.
On the left, we use the cloth simulation to drop a rubbery sheet which collides with a rigid body object. On the right, balls of increasing mass are dropped into a pool of water, causing greater and greater displacement and splashing.
This type of unified representation can help machine learning models use both the underlying physics and rendered images to learn a physical and visual representation of the world through interactions with objects in the world.
Advanced Physics Benchmark Dataset
Using the TDW platform, we have created a comprehensive benchmark for training and evaluation of physically-realistic forward prediction algorithms, which will be released as part of the TDW package.
Once completed, this dataset will contain a large and varied collection of physical scene trajectories, including all data from visual, depth, and force sensors, high-level semantic label information for each frame, as well as latent generative parameters and code controllers for all situations.
This dataset goes well beyond existing related benchmarks, providing scenarios with large numbers of complex real-world object geometries, photo-realistic textures, as well as a variety of rigid, soft-body, cloth, and fluid materials.
The codebase for generating the dataset will be made publicly available in conjunction with the TDW platform.
Indirect Object Interaction Through Avatars
In TDW, avatars are the embodiment of AI agents within a scene.
Avatars can take the form of simple disembodied cameras for generating egocentric-view rendered images, segmentation and depth maps etc.
Avatars using simple geometric primitives such as cubes or spheres can move around the environment, acting as basic embodied agents. These avatars are well-suited to basic algorithm prototyping.
More complex embodied avatars are possible with user-defined physical structures and physically-mapped action spaces
The Magnebot robot's mobility and arm articulation actions are driven by physics, as opposed to any form of pre-scripted animation, and controlled using high-level API commands. Here Magnebot uses its "magnet" end-effector to remove an object from a table. It also picks up a series of objects and places them into a container held by its other magnet; it then carries them to a different room and pours them out again.
Research Use Cases
TDW has been used in a number of labs within MIT and Stanford, as well as IBM
Visual Recognition Transfer
A learned visual feature representation, trained on a TDW image classification dataset comparable to ImageNet, was transferred to fine-grained image classification and object detection task.
Multi-modal Physical Scene Understanding
TDW's audio impact synthesis generated a synthetic dataset of impact sounds used to test material and mass classification.
Learnable Physics Models
Using TDW's ability to handle complex physical collisions and non-rigid deformations, agents learn to predict physical dynamics in novel settings.
Visual Learning in Curious Agents
Intrinsically-motivated agents based on TDW's high-quality rendering and flexible avatar models exhibit rudimentary self-awareness and curiosity.
Social Agents and Virtual Reality
In experiments on animate attention, both human observers in VR and a neural network agent embodying concepts of intrinsic curiosity found animacy to be more "interesting".
Frequently Asked Questions
Find answers to frequently asked questions about TDW.
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How fast is TDW?
Fast! Here are some basic benchmarks:
Benchmark Quality Image Size FPS Object transform data, 100 objects N/A N/A 761 Image capture Low 256x256 380 Image capture High 1024x1024 41 Move avatar per frame Low 256x256 160 Flex Benchmark (Windows) FlexParticles,
Transform, CameraMatrices, and CollisionsN/A N/A 204 -
Can I contribute to TDW?
If you want to contribute code, you can create a new branch and then open a PR from your fork of the TDW repo. Please note however the code for the simulation binary (the "build") is still closed-source, meaning that you won't be able to directly modify the API, fix bugs in the build, etc. If you have suggestions, feature requests, bug reports, etc., please add them as GitHub Issues.
However if you believe that your particular use case absolutely requires access to the backend source code, then please refer to the discussion on our repo regarding this: Requesting access to TDW C# source code
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Can TDW do...?
Maybe! See our README: ThreeDWorld (TDW)
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What are the system requirements?
- Windows, OS X, or Linux.
- For high-fidelity rendering and particle-based physics simulations, an NVIDIA GPU.
- Python 3.6+
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How often is TDW updated?
TDW's team is working full-time on the project, so expect feature updates every few weeks or so.
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Can I run TDW on a Linux server?
Yes. You can optionally run your Python code on a different machine. Additionally, the repo contains a Docker file for TDW. Further details on Docker container.
Our Team
Development Team

Jeremy Schwartz
Project Lead, MIT BCS
Seth Alter
Lead Developer, MIT BCSPrincipal Investigators
Contributors

James Traer
MIT BCS
Jonas Kubilius
MIT BCS
Martin Schrimpf
MIT BCS
Abhishek Bhandwaldar
MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab
Julian DeFreitas
Vision Sciences Lab, Harvard
Damian Mwroca
Stanford NeuroAILab
Michael Lingelbach
Stanford NeuroAILab
Megumi Sano
Stanford NeuroAILab
Dan Bear
Stanford NeuroAILab
Kuno Kim
Stanford NeuroAILab
Nick Haber
Stanford NeuroAILab
Chaofei Fan
Stanford NeuroAILabBrain and Cognitive Sciences, MIT
If you are interested in using TDW in your research, please contact:
Jeremy Schwartz,
TDW Project Lead
43 Vassar St
Cambridge, MA 02139





