Splatfacto-W

A very interesting area of research in the world of volumetric capture is the concept of being able to create 3D representations of scenes from “unconstrained image collections”, i.e. random images of a scene taken at different times of day, with different cameras, etc. Splatfacto-W is an approach for doing just that, and has been implemented in popular NeRF and gaussian splatting software, Nerfstudio.

A potential use case within VFX for such an approach might be producing 3D representations of buildings that no longer exist but for which there’s lots of photographs, or scenes that are awkward to access for a dedicated volumetric capture.

WildGaussians is another approach to this same challenge, so there’s a bit of activity in this area. I’m looking forward to seeing what people make with these, and giving it a go myself!