[KaiserPro]

Its entirely down to AR.

Facebook need a sub CM accurate, self-updating, visual positioning map. Its the only practical way that "multiplayer" AR can work. (in fact any kind of useful AR)

SLAM only gets you so far (as we've seen with google and apple) as its only capable of tracking relative movements (if you have two phones, both their coordinate systems will be relative to their starting point, making accurate placing of assets impractical )

So what does mapillary do that helps?

1) the real time segmentation on a mobile phone is fucking spectacular, compare the speed and robustness to FB's panopticon, it blows everything out of the water

2) the geolocation of random imagery allows facebook to build out a sparse pointcloud suitable for generating cityscale visual positioning.

3) the anonymisation pipeline they have is also very good.

[gyre007]

I tend to agree with this. Facebook also silently acquired the very amibitious UK startup called https://www.scape.io/ whose mission was VPS = Visual Positioning System. Their SDK/APIs allowed to build AR app easily, but now they're part of FB. That makes me think that its AR which is here at play.