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Comment by Ameo | Hacker News Reader

Wow - the in-browser demo (https://arthurbrussee.github.io/brush-demo/) runs way more performantly and renders much better-looking results than any other I'd tried in the past.

It loaded my 50MB .ply file almost instantly. Orbiting around the scene is extremely smooth and everything is free of flickering or artifacts.

I never tried out training a Gaussian splat from images/video myself before, but this tool makes me want to give it a go.

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Love to hear it!! Most viewers take some shortcuts, like only sorting every so often, it's good to hear the difference is noticable :)

Training a splat requires a lot less setup with this, but does still require running COLMAP(https://github.com/colmap/colmap) first, which is still a big barrier... one thing at a time!

Feel the same as GP here.

How expensive is the COLMAP step to run? I was also really impressed with the speed in the demo (but thinking that the shown training was the only step)

Could you ELI5 what the training is versus what the COLMAP part is?

The input to this are two things - images, and camare poses. The camera poses tell you where each camera was in 3D space (and some of its properties).

The training takes this information, to make a 3D model out it, visually matching all your photos.

COLMAP can still be quite expensive & a hassle sadly, order half hour, as opposed to seconds. There are modern alternatives like https://lpanaf.github.io/eccv24_glomap/, or even deep learning based systems like https://github.com/naver/dust3r

This is definitely still a big blocker to adoption. The goal is to get to a more all-in-one system. The splatting optimization can also help align cameras, if they don't start out entirely random, so any system to quickly provide a good "initial guess" will help here. At least for mobile devices, initialization from ARCore / ARKit poses should be enough.

Keep an eye out :)

If you're capturing on a mobile device, why not use Scaniverse? It's about as all-in-one as it gets - you just scan and it'll generate a .ply after a minute or two of processing. They'll host the splat for you in the cloud if you want too.

For me, at least, I want to own all my data, and not give any away without explicit permission. So, even in the case of Scaniverse, I'm reluctant.

But I'm just an artist trying to read and learn, and haven't yet gotten around to actually figuring out how to do all this on my Macbook Pro M1 yet ^-^

how do you get the .ply file to load into it? which software do you use to generate those files?

I used an app on my phone called Scaniverse

I'm sure there are others as well

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