Abstract We present the major advantages of a new ‘object oriented’ 3D SLAM paradigm, which takes full advantage in the loop of prior knowledge that many scenes consist of repeated, domain-specifific objects and structures. As a hand-held depth camera browses a cluttered scene, realtime 3D object recognition and tracking provides 6DoF camera-object constraints which feed into an explicit graph of objects, continually refifined by effificient pose-graph optimisation. This offers the descriptive and predictive power of SLAM systems which perform dense surface reconstruction, but with a huge representation compression. The object graph enables predictions for accurate ICP-based camera to model tracking at each live frame, and effificient active search for new objects in currently undescribed image regions. We demonstrate real-time incremental SLAM in large, cluttered environments, including loop closure, relocalisation and the detection of moved objects, and of course the generation of an object level scene description with the potential to enable interaction.