alt Hacker NewsThere's a ton of fun tricks you can perform with Gaussian splatting!
You're right that you can intentionally under-construct your scenes. These can create a dream-like effect.
It's also possible to stylize your Gaussian splats to produce NPR effects. Check out David Lisser's amazing work: https://davidlisser.co.uk/Surface-Tension.
Additionally, you can intentionally introduce view-dependent ghosting artifacts. In other words, if you take images from a certain angle that contain an object, and remove that object for other views, it can produce a lenticular/holographic effect.
Y'all did such a good job with this. It captivated HN and was the top post for the entire day, and will probably last for much of tomorrow.
If you don't know already, you need to leverage this. HN is one of the biggest channels of engineers and venture capitalists on the internet. It's almost pure signal (minus some grumpy engineer grumblings - we're a grouchy lot sometimes).
Post your contract info here. You might get business inquiries. If you've got any special software or process in what you do, there might be "venture scale" business opportunities that come your way. Certainly clients, but potentially much more.
(I'd certainly like to get in touch!)
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edit: Since I'm commenting here, I'll expand on my thoughts. I've been rate limited all day long, and I don't know if I can post another response.
I believe volumetric is going to be huge for creative work in the coming years.
Gaussian splats are a huge improvement over point clouds and NeRFs in terms of accessibility and rendering, but the field has so many potential ways to evolve.
I was always in love with Intel's "volume", but it was impractical [1, 2] and got shut down. Their demos are still impressive, especially from an equipment POV, but A$AP Rocky's music video is technically superior.
During the pandemic, to get over my lack of in-person filmmaking, I wrote Unreal Engine shaders to combine the output of several Kinect point clouds [3] to build my own lightweight version inspired by what Intel was doing. The VGA resolution of consumer volumetric hardware was a pain and I was faced with fpga solutions for higher real time resolution, or going 100% offline.
World Labs and Apple are doing exciting work with image-to-Gaussian models [4, 5], and World Labs created the fantastic Spark library [6] for viewing them.
I've been leveraging splats to do controllable image gen and video generation [7], where they're extremely useful for consistent sets and props between shots.
I think the next steps for Gaussian splats are good editing tools, segmenting, physics, etc. The generative models are showing a lot of promise too. The Hunyuan team is supposedly working on a generative Gaussian model.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24Y4zby6tmo (film)
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4NJUiBZVx5c (hardware)
[3] https://www.twitch.tv/videos/969978954?collection=02RSMb5adR...
[4] https://www.worldlabs.ai/blog/marble-world-model
[5] https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/sharp-monocular-v...
[6] https://sparkjs.dev/
[7] https://github.com/storytold/artcraft (in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iD999naQq9A or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8L4_ot1bQA )