At the Gaussian Splatting Town Hall, NVIDIA has just made two exciting announcements: both 3D Gaussian Ray Tracing (3DGRT) and 3D Gaussian Unscented Transform (3DGUT) are going to be open-sourced.
We covered 3DGRT last year. This method marks a complete departure from Gaussian Splatting, utilizing a purely ray-tracing-based implementation. It highlights how the exploration of radiance field representations remains active and dynamic. The introduction of new Radiance Field representations is still ongoing, and it’s entirely possible that another could be published at any time—perhaps even next week.
The second method, 3D Gaussian Unscented Transform, bridges the gap by bringing ray-traced effects to Gaussian Splatting. This development is particularly exciting, as it represents a new way to integrate the precision of ray tracing with the efficiency of splatting. Seeing this method released into the open-source ecosystem is a significant milestone.
Notably, this will be the first major codebase directly related to radiance fields to be made available since the release of Instant NGP. Both 3DGRT and 3DGUT focus on ray-tracing-based effects, with 3DGUT specifically reintroducing ray-traced capabilities to the rasterization-focused world of splatting.
Details about the full release date and licensing terms for these projects are still pending. Late last year, Janusch and I had the privilege of speaking with Zan Gojcic, the author of both 3D Gaussian Ray Tracing and 3D Gaussian Unscented Transform, on the View Dependent Podcast.
This article will be updated with more information as it becomes available.
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