Last week at SIGGRAPH, several companies and research teams participated in a live demo of their respective work at Real Time Live. Each were impressive in their own right, but excitingly a dynamic gaussian splatting demo from Infinite Studio (4DV) won the best award, as voted by the audience.
4DV.ai rippled throughout the internet earlier this year, when someone found a link to their website through the FreetimeGS project page. What was unleashed thereafter was a deluge of interest (and misinformation) about dynamic gaussian splatting. No you cannot use only one camera to do this.
Jiaming Sun, CEO of 4DV, showed impressive demos, one after the next, allowing the audience to see the individual gaussians making up the scenes. He also said during the demo that they are aiming to enable the general population to capture their own 4D videos out in the world.
Zhi Wang showed a Blender plugin for dynamic gaussian splatting. The audience was treated to seeing the scenes render in real time through Evee and Cycles. Additionally the Cycles demo showed that their implementation is fully ray traced! They also have the ability to instance the splats, making infinite versions of the captures. More capabilities showcased the ability to change the depth of field and focal plane in post.
However, the demo did not stop there! The 4DV team then brought a dynamic capture into Unreal Engine through another plugin. While the demo briefly stuttered, no one could fault it as it revealed all of the other previously shown applications were still running! With a quick closing of tabs, the demo returned, crisper than ever to the excitement of the audience.
The demo was just the beginning of what dynamic 3D video can mean for the world, both in our professional and personal lives. As imaging continues to leap forwards into lifelike 3D, it will only be logical that hardware and software enable us to capture life's moments in more detail.
Congratulations Jiaming and the rest of the 4DV team! Learn more about 4DV on their website.
