Ben Mildenhall Gives Keynote at 3DV in Davos

With all the excitement of last week between GDC and GTC, there was also a great conference named 3DV that took place in Davos, Switzerland. Giving the keynote address was the first author of NeRF and recent Google employee, Ben Mildenhall.

You might recognize Ben Mildenhall’s name from other significant papers, such as Zip-NeRF, Reconfusion, CamP, Nuvo, and Mip-NeRF 360.

The entirety of his lecture is hosted free on YouTube to watch and it was a very entertaining lecture. The video spans two hours, but Ben Mildenhall roughly speaks for the first 70 minutes. The talk is by far the best glimpse into the research leading up to NeRF, the moments immediately preceding, and the days following the discovery of NeRFs.

Going from the familiar, upcoming deadline, to the literal “Holy Shit” moment, provided by Jon Barron.

Ben also uses the back half of his talk to speak about recent research into generative Radiance Fields, including his work on Reconfusion. Towards the end, an audience member asks Mildenhall what he thinks about NeRFs vs Gaussian Splatting and I agree with his answer.

People will note that Ben actually departed from Google late last year and thus everyone wants to know, what in the world is Ben Mildenhall building? Perhaps this talk might hold some clues, but I feel confident in stating that whatever it is it’s going to be epic, when he is ready to share.

There is even more content that has been coming out of 3DV, with a great lecture from original 3D Gaussian Splatting author Bernhard Kerbl. At around the 50 minute mark, it switches to a lecture about Dynamic Gaussian Splatting from Jonathon Luiten The last part of the talk is from Antoine Guédon, whose Gaussian Frosting paper we just looked at, yesterday! This too can be found on YouTube for free.