> Today’s SLAM systems help machines geometrically understand the immediate world (i.e., build associations in a local coordinate system) while today’s Deep Learning systems help machines reason categorically (i.e., build associations across distinct object instances). In conclusion, I share Newcombe and Davison excitement in Visual SLAM, as vision-based algorithms are going to turn Augmented and Virtual Reality into billion dollar markets. However, we should not forget to keep our eyes on the "trillion-dollar" market, the one that's going to redefine what it means to "work" -- namely Robotics. The day of Robot SLAM will come soon.

from http://www.computervisionblog.com/2016/01/why-slam-matters-f...

I'm more familiar with "classical" computer vision and pattern recognition, but this makes sense to me.