Hardware-Rasterized Ray-Based Gaussian Splatting

We present a novel, hardware rasterized rendering approach for ray-based 3D Gaussian Splatting (RayGS), obtaining both fast and high-quality results for novel view synthesis. Our work contains a mathematically rigorous and geometrically intuitive derivation about how to efficiently estimate all relevant quantities for rendering RayGS models, structured with respect to standard hardware rasterization shaders. Our solution is the first enabling rendering RayGS models at sufficiently high frame rates to support quality-sensitive applications like Virtual and Mixed Reality. Our second contribution enables alias-free rendering for RayGS, by addressing MIP-related issues arising when rendering diverging scales during training and testing. We demonstrate significant performance gains, across different benchmark scenes, while retaining state-of-the-art appearance quality of RayGS.

SqueezeMe: Efficient Gaussian Avatars for VR

Gaussian Splatting has enabled real-time 3D human avatars with unprecedented levels of visual quality. While previous methods require a desktop GPU for real-time inference of a single avatar, we aim to squeeze multiple Gaussian avatars onto a portable virtual reality headset with real-time drivable inference. We begin by training a previous work, Animatable Gaussians, on a high quality dataset captured with 512 cameras. The Gaussians are animated by controlling base set of Gaussians with linear blend skinning (LBS) motion and then further adjusting the Gaussians with a neural network decoder to correct their appearance. When deploying the model on a Meta Quest 3 VR headset, we find two major computational bottlenecks: the decoder and the rendering. To accelerate the decoder, we train the Gaussians in UV-space instead of pixel-space, and we distill the decoder to a single neural network layer. Further, we discover that neighborhoods of Gaussians can share a single corrective from the decoder, which provides an additional speedup. To accelerate the rendering, we develop a custom pipeline in Vulkan that runs on the mobile GPU. Putting it all together, we run 3 Gaussian avatars concurrently at 72 FPS on a VR headset. Demo videos are at https://forresti.github.io/squeezeme.