Electric vehicle maker Rivian has acquired Third Dimension, a U.K. startup that uses artificial intelligence to turn images and video into lifelike 3D worlds. Rivian announced the deal on Thursday and did not disclose the terms.
Rivian isn’t getting into gaming. The company wants to use Third Dimension’s technology to turn real-world driving data into 3D worlds that can speed up development of its advanced driver-assistance features and the self-driving system for robotaxis it plans to supply to Uber.
Third Dimension was founded in 2024 by CEO Tolga Kart and Piotr Sokólski. The company raised $7 million in seed funding from venture capital firms including Abstract Ventures, MVP, Soma Capital and Solari Capital. Its technology was originally built to speed up video game development, but the founders saw other uses, including defense and autonomous vehicles.
The 15-person team, most of whom are based in the U.K., will be absorbed into Rivian’s autonomy and AI group, led by James Philbin. Philbin said the deal also gives Rivian a chance to expand its AI hub in London.
Turning real drives into test scenarios
Simulation is a core tool for companies developing self-driving systems, which use it to train and validate their software. Older simulators were built on rendering or video game engines and often relied on synthetic data. Those virtual worlds can look like the real one, Kart said, but a gap between the two remains. The usual workaround is to feed simulators ever-larger amounts of data in hopes of closing that gap.
Third Dimension’s platform rebuilds real driving footage as 3D environments that engineers can control. A team can recreate a tricky moment and then change it, moving the cameras, shifting other road users, or altering the lighting and weather.
“For us, it’s about taking real scenarios, but making them simulatable,” Philbin said. “These are not synthetic kind of video game styles, they’re real things that happen in the world, but now we get that extra dial of being able to move the cameras around, shift other agents, have maybe different lighting or weather conditions.”
Rivian said it evaluated “a lot of different providers” before buying the company.
The raw material comes from Rivian’s own fleet. The company collects driving data from tens of thousands of R1T pickups, R1S SUVs, delivery vans and R2 SUVs on the road today, essentially any vehicle whose owner has enabled external camera sharing. That data is aggregated and anonymized, and Philbin said Rivian receives more than 400,000 sequences uploaded from its customer fleets each day.
The simulator is meant to fill in what real driving cannot provide on demand. Rivian no longer has to wait for rare edge cases to occur on the road before it can test how its software handles them, Philbin said. The tool matters most at the final step, when the company decides whether a system is ready for customers.
“Is the system good to ship?” Philbin said. “And there, you really want to have a good sense of this sim-to-real gap, because to do that kind of hand on heart, you really need to trust that answer is in the positive. Otherwise, you’re measuring something that’s not representative of how it will actually perform in the real world.”
Where Rivian’s self-driving push stands
Rivian already offers “Universal Hands-Free” driving software that lets drivers take their hands off the wheel on highways while still watching the road. By the end of the year, the company plans to release a version that can handle an entire drive through surface streets and highways without touching the wheel. Drivers will still have to supervise and be ready to take over.
Full autonomy is the next goal. Rivian plans to deploy it in robotaxi versions of its R2 SUV, which are scheduled to be available on the Uber app in 2028.
Kart said a small company trying to serve many different masters is difficult, and that the team was excited to focus on one problem with significant scale. “The team is excited to be able to focus on one problem,” Kart said in an interview with TechCrunch.
Rivian also faces a lawsuit alleging it promised self-driving features its first-generation vehicles can never deliver. Other companies are pursuing similar tools. Google DeepMind has connected Street View to its Genie world model.
Cet article a été rédigé avec l'assistance de l'IA.
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