We're getting another Gaussian Splatting engine today, from Arcturus Industries. Arcturus is Spanish company formed in 2020 with the aim of building the most sophisticated 3D perception engine for VR and AR.
According to their Twitter, it will be able to be used for commercial applications and runs on pure CUDA. This implementation is fast, like very fast. It's able to train to 7,000 steps in just over one minute (68 seconds). For reference, when I use the original Inria method with my 3090, it takes roughly 6-7 minutes. Impressively, this also only requires 5GB of VRAM.
There will be an app coming before the end of the year for people to try out for themselves, but it could be sooner than later.
A small, but important feature is the ability to watch the scene train in front of your eyes. That was one of the first things that got me hooked when I first started using Instant NGP and recently through Luma's Magic Reveal, you get a similar effect. Similar to NeRF, you can interact with the scene as it trains, to watch the scene form from whatever perspective you like.
You might remember seeing this video from their CEO, exploring a NeRF in VR already over a year ago. I remember watching it and thinking, wow I can't believe I'm seeing NeRFs in VR. How times have changed.
As part of their overarching vision, Arcturus Industries are looking at this as an eventual evolution of photography and videos. This is exactly how I look at radiance fields and am encouraged that Arcturus Industries are looking at it from this perspective. With the progression of the technology, I firmly believe that we are entering the foundational age of what comes after photography.
As more information about Arcturus Industries rolls out, we'll be sure to document and keep you informed. You can also follow them on Twitter and sign up for notifications from their website as well.
Happy Friday!
