[x3d-public] Gaussian splats

Don Brutzman don.brutzman at gmail.com
Fri Nov 28 21:24:13 PST 2025 

Just found several more interesting references relating to Gaussian splats.

   - *NY Times, Spatial Journalism: A Field Guide To Gaussian Splatting*
   - by By A.J. Chavar, Oscar Durand, Mint Boonyapanachoti
   - December 16, 2024
   - Gaussian splatting holds a lot of promise for 3D recreation and
   spatial storytelling. It’s faster and more photorealistic than
   photogrammetry, and much easier to process and interact with than neural
   radiance fields — giving journalists and readers the best of both worlds.
   - These advantages are due to the novel way that splats reconstruct 3D
   scenes. In a splat, people, places, and objects are made up of a point
   cloud defined by gaussian functions. Each gaussian function is essentially
   a 2D disc assigned to a point in 3D space with attributes for orientation,
   color, transparency, and size. When viewed in aggregate, these coalesce
   into a 3D scene that can very accurately represent certain things that
   other volumetric captures cannot: reflection, transparency, fine detail and
   the qualities of the light in a scene.
   - In this guide, we give an overview of the practical takeaways we
   learned exploring exploring gaussian splatting for spatial journalism. We
   tested a variety of capture and processing techniques using a variety of
   hardware and software, and found solutions on desktop and mobile devices.
   We also assessed splatting against the benchmarks we typically associate
   with photogrammetry, the current standard for 3D recreation.
   - https://rd.nytimes.com/projects/gaussian-splatting-guide


   - *NY Times, Spatial Journalism:   Pushing the Limits of Gaussian
   Splatting for Spatial Storytelling*
   - By AJ Chavar, Mint Boonyapanchoti, Juan Cabrera, Oscar Durand, Yasmin
   Elayat, Claudia Miranda, Kojo Opuni
   - December 16, 2024
   - Abstract.   Advancements in capturing and rendering 3D scenes have the
   potential to create spatial stories faster and more easily than has
   previously been possible. Building off of our earlier experiments with
   photogrammetry and neural radiance fields (NeRF), R&D, with support from
   the Graphics Department, set out to understand gaussian splatting and
   continue to explore the future of photography and 3D media. Modern gaussian
   splatting caught our eye after "3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time
   Radiance Field Rendering" was named one of the best papers of SIGGRAPH
   2023. While photogrammetry is a tried-and-tested method, it’s extremely
   labor- and compute- intensive, and it reliably fails to reconstruct certain
   textures and settings. NeRF technology addresses some of these concerns,
   but is extremely difficult to deliver these radiance fields to audiences.
   We wanted to see how splatting fared under similar circumstances.
   - https://rd.nytimes.com/projects/gaussian-splatting


   - *3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering*
   - SIGGRAPH 2023 (ACM Transactions on Graphics)
   - Bernhard Kerbl* 1,2      Georgios Kopanas* 1,2      Thomas Leimkühler3
        George Drettakis1,2
   - Abstract.  Radiance Field methods have recently revolutionized
   novel-view synthesis of scenes captured with multiple photos or videos.
   However, achieving high visual quality still requires neural networks that
   are costly to train and render, while recent faster methods inevitably
   trade off speed for quality. For unbounded and complete scenes (rather than
   isolated objects) and 1080p resolution rendering, no current method can
   achieve real-time display rates.
   - We introduce three key elements that allow us to achieve
   state-of-the-art visual quality while maintaining competitive training
   times and importantly allow high-quality real-time (≥ 100 fps) novel-view
   synthesis at 1080p resolution.
   - First, starting from sparse points produced during camera calibration,
   we represent the scene with 3D Gaussians that preserve desirable properties
   of continuous volumetric radiance fields for scene optimization while
   avoiding unnecessary computation in empty space; Second, we perform
   interleaved optimization/density control of the 3D Gaussians, notably
   optimizing anisotropic covariance to achieve an accurate representation of
   the scene; Third, we develop a fast visibility-aware rendering algorithm
   that supports anisotropic splatting and both accelerates training and
   allows realtime rendering. We demonstrate state-of-the-art visual quality
   and real-time rendering on several established datasets.
   - https://repo-sam.inria.fr/fungraph/3d-gaussian-splatting


all the best, Don
-- 
X3D Graphics, Maritime Robotics, Distributed Simulation
Relative Motion Consulting  https://RelativeMotion.info


On Fri, Nov 28, 2025 at 9:04 PM Don Brutzman <don.brutzman at gmail.com> wrote:

> Thank you for exploring this topic Doug.  Interesting developments.
>
> Traditionally .ply files have been used for defining triangles or
> polygonal mesh, similar in many ways to .stl files.
>
> Possible future extension for X3D Architecture is to define a new
> InlineGeometry node that can read .stl or ply files to create a coordinate
> mesh, returning a Coordinate node perhaps.  Such offline conversions for
> scanned meshes are possible now.
>
> However, am not sure how gaussian splats can utilize the .ply format.
> This seems like a relatively new development - do you know where that is
> written up?
>
> PLY references follow.
>
>    - Wikipedia PLY (file format)
>    - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLY_(file_format)
>
>
>    - Internet Archive: The PLY Polygon File Format, Author: Greg Turk
>    -
>    https://web.archive.org/web/20161204152348/http://www.dcs.ed.ac.uk/teaching/cs4/www/graphics/Web/ply.html
>
>
>    - Wikipedia: Gaussian splatting
>    - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaussian_splatting
>    - (no mention of files or formats that i saw)
>
> Since there is a lot of innovation ongoing with Gaussian splats, we want
> to be thorough and careful when looking at potential X3D standardization.
>
> all the best, Don
> --
> X3D Graphics, Maritime Robotics, Distributed Simulation
> Relative Motion Consulting  https://RelativeMotion.info
>
>
> On Sat, Nov 22, 2025 at 9:31 AM GPU Group via x3d-public <
> x3d-public at web3d.org> wrote:
>
>> "Gaussian Splatting"
>> .ply files appear to deliver similar polygons as X3D IndexedTriangleSet
>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLY_(file_format)
>> https://www.web3d.org/documents/specifications/19775-1/V4.0/index.html
>> Methods to get .ply into x3d scene:
>> 0. pre-process with non-browser tool to convert to x3d scene snippet for
>> inlining
>> 1. Special new IndexedTriangleSetPly node with a url field
>> 2. Proto containing i) first node IndexedTriangleSet, ii) Script node to
>> process ply into IndexedTriangleSet, and either:
>> a) SAI function for javascript to read an arbitrary file url into a blob
>> for processing from ply to IndexedTriangleSet by javascript
>> b) a new node type that reads an arbitrary file into an SFImage as a
>> blob, a route to move the SFImage to Script for processing from ply to
>> IndexedTriangleSet
>> Q. or is there another method that's easier / already working?
>> -Doug
>>
>> On Tue, Nov 18, 2025 at 9:31 AM Bergstrom, Aaron via x3d-public <
>> x3d-public at web3d.org> wrote:
>>
>>> X3D and AI Stakeholders,
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Please join us for the X3D-AI Working Group meeting this * Wed, Nov
>>> 19th* at *2pm GMT* (*9am US Eastern* – *6am Pacific*)
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> The agenda for this week will include the following topics:
>>>
>>>    - Metaverse Standards Forum - AI Working Group
>>>    - Gaussian Splatting – Proposed Node Text
>>>    - AI Assisted Content Creation
>>>    - Near-term Activities of the X3D-AI Working Group
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> The Zoom link for the meeting and a more detailed agenda can be found at
>>> the Calendar link below
>>>
>>>
>>> https://www.web3d.org/calendar/2800/x3d-ai-working-group-meeting/2025-11-19t140000-2025-12-17t140000-2026-01-21t140000
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Hope to see everyone there,
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Aaron Bergstrom
>>>
>>> X3D-AI Working Group Chair
>>>
>>> https://www.web3d.org/working-groups/ai-x3d
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
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