Remember HoloBike from Saga, a new indie project which recently launched a Kickstarter, raising 4x its target goal? It basically integrates a virtual world with an exercise bike -- without needing a VR headset.
Courtesy founder/lead engineer Samuel Matson (who last worked in Google's VR division), here's some video which shows how Saga intends to create that virtual world. What you're looking at above was actually first captured by a drone in the real world, with an algorithmic process which converted it into this virtual scene:
"We ran an initial test of a small scale Gaussian Splatted environment," he tells me. "this shows a novel new approach to generating environments with AI from drone footage. The AI learns the relative 3D position of numerous points (splats) from just 2D footage to construct a volumetric scene. The artifacts you can see in this footage are a byproduct of this learning and can be improved with optimization.
"Still very early days, but it hints at the potential for digital twins."
Yes. This is hardly the first project to do something like this (here's one from 2019), but I'm impressed by how quickly the visual/immersive fidelity improves.
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So these are synthetic environments? It seems to be jumping the gun a bit, why not have real environments captured? There are so many incredible places around the world that could be captured and would show off this technology really well.
Gaussian Splatting can be really mind blowing in quality and performance, see here: https://gsplat.tech/
Posted by: Nexii | Saturday, July 20, 2024 at 03:35 PM