Late yesterday evening a seemingly innocuous post went up on the Linkedin of Aden Zhang.
Zhang is the Sales Director at XGRIDS, a Chinese 3D scanning and LiDAR device manufacturer. He announced the first ever handheld LiDAR scanner, the Lixel L2, capable of creating Gaussian Splatting. For those wondering why that's a big deal, LiDAR is a laser based method, that is often used for Photogrammetry and 3D scanning because of the precise measurements you get. It also happens to be what I was creating with prior to radiance fields.
I met up with one of the XGRIDS employees who was kind enough to drive to GTC and we captured the above video outside of NVIDIA's GTC. There were so many people walking around the exterior while we were capturing, but the vast majority just vanishes in the reconstruction.
You can plainly see that there are just no floaters or artifacts contained in the demo video. As you might expect, this quickly generated large interest on Linkedin, with people interested to try the Lixel L2.
This is the first time I've seen a laser scanner capable of producing radiance fields, which drastically cuts down the time it takes to capture large scale areas. From the demo video, Zhang states that it took roughly 15 minutes to capture the area. It opens up the possibility of large scale hyper realistic areas to receive the hallmark view dependent effects of radiance fields.
Just recently, we saw Polycam begin to offer measurements from Gaussian Splatting and this seems to greatly extend the ability for people to pull measurements.
XGRIDS also released a Unity Plugin to begin visualizing outputs in the engine.
It's easy to imagine the potential large scale use cases of radiance fields across industries such as travel, AEC, manufacturing, and federal applications. The Lixel L2 is not currently available to the public, but there are more demos to come shortly.
