360 Drone Vs "Standard" Drone for #GaussianSplatting.
I picked an EPIC location to see who wins ���
This is the Der Haar Castle, the largest and most luxurious castle in the Netherlands. The original castle dates back to the 14th century and after 1890 was fully rebuilt thanks to the Rothschild's fortune.
The scan on the left was done using an @Antigravity_HQ A1, a fairly new drone that captures in 8K spread across a 360 panorama. The 3DGS reconstruction was done by extracting a cubemap from the extracted equirectangular frames and then processing the images in Postshot with 30K iterations, capping at 5M Splats
The scan on the right was done by Marc van Vliet at the same moment using the Mini 4 Pro from @DJIGlobal , a gimbal drone capturing at standard 4K. Reconstruction was done with 500 pictures 30K iterations and also capped at 5M splats.
I put both models into a viewer built on top of Voluma AI that has a very handy slider so you can closely inspect the various areas of the models... and even how the castle looked like on a previous scan when there were no scaffolds ( *wink* to construction people out there).
I think the DJI Mini 4 Pro wins (do you agree?):
- Colours are more accurate
- Details look sharper
- Water sits on the same plane
but...
The more I test this 360 drone for Gaussian Splatting, the more I realise its value is in the coverage, and an individual object/area/location is not where this drone shines.
Some areas were completely missed by the DJI and the horizon is significantly better reconstructed by the Antigravity. The other variable to consider is the different reconstruction pipelines, which I am still figuring out.
To do that, I decided to put the same footage through 10 different tools and workflows to see exactly how to get the best reconstruction from a 360 drone, either on the cloud, locally or entirely for free.
The video is almost done and includes the handy comparer and the source video so that you can run the data through your pipeline and compare both quantitatively and qualitatively with all reconstruction solutions for 360 (aerial) footage available on the market.
Follow me so you don't miss it when the video comes out.
@anyelinanicole2 If you want to capture just the Castle no. If you want to have a splat of a wider area that breaks less easily when changing viewpoint then yes.
What have you been up to over the weekend?
I think you can guess some of the things I will be sharing soon 😉
If you have questions or tips on reconstructing #gaussianSplatting from a 360 drone, just let me know in the comments.
Next week is going to be a BIG one for #XR.
I have so many hopes for the @Spectacles announcement at @ARealityEvent .
- The hope the technology has matured enough to pack everything we truly need in a comfortable form factor.
- The hope that, regardless of the costs, there is a strategy to make sure users or consumers can truly take advantage of this tech
- The hope the value is proven so we can get out of the POC purgatory and consumers keep using it, not just because it is cool, but because it adds value
- The hope that AI is taken seriously and can help us to do more than come up with what to cook or when to water my plants.
Am I expecting too much? What are your expectations?
Postshot is better than LichtFeld. I said it!
Suck it up or provide evidence 👇
I will articulate below my reasoning, but if you REALLY want to prove LichtFeld is the better reconstruction tool for 3DGS, let me know.
I can share the windmill dataset shown below, captured from 360° drone footage. Feel free to run it through your pipeline, and I'll include the results in my next in-depth comparison video, where I'm benchmarking seven different reconstruction workflows, along with a big shout-out and thanks for your support.
Now that we got the "request for help" out of the way, let me explain.
LichtFeld might be free, support plugins and provide much more control than an off-the-shelf solution like Postshot but...
If I have to hop between software to reconstruct the COLMAP and i need much more compute power to obtain the same or a better result in Postshot, I will stick with the paid option (at 26 EUR/month) that saves me a ton of time.
The UI is also much more user-friendly, frame extraction is automatic and i never experienced any crashes.
Do you have a different experience? Isn't Postshot worth the monthly subscription?
Let me know in the comments and don't forget to ping me if you want to contribute to my in-depth comparison video coming out soon.
It is quite crazy what you can get to run on a browser nowadays.
This game is called Pezzi and it is a half rhythm game, half puzzle that works everywhere:
💻 On PC with a mouse
📱 On phone
🥽 In VR with both controllers and hands
I am working with @VIVERSEofficial , and the variety of experiences on the platform is quite impressive, from casual games to full-blown adventures with a save system.
We need better tools to tell stories around #GaussianSplatting.
That's why I liked what #Dioramix can do.
A web-based editor to build interactive #3D presentations
- Camera views act like slides
- You have several options for text positioning and layouts
- Add additional media types like images, videos or extra 3D models
- Set button states based on your branding guidelines.
Special thanks to Olli Huttunen for putting this together and giving me early access.
This is your chance to know everything about these masterpieces.
Drop your questions in the comments because next week I will interview @DanyBittel , the creator of these and many more fascinating examples of #3DGS reconstruction using macro photography.
Follow me to make sure you don't miss the full interview once it comes out and the many more I publish every week on XR AI Spotlight to dive into the intersection of #3D, #XR and #AI.