Gaussian Splatting

Tap it: random splats learn the photo. Pick another View in the Splash tab.

Gaussian splatting draws a scene with many soft, colored blobs called splats. Each one has a place, a size in three directions, a turn, a color and an opacity. A scan's splats are trained the way a network learns: start from a rough cloud of points (worked out from the photos, or random), compare the picture it makes with the photos, and nudge every splat a little, again and again, until they match.

Tap it: a cloud of random splats slides, stretches and recolors into the strawberry photo, a real fit of 2,400 splats, while its error falls on the chart. Other views show one splat with its three axes, which a tap trains: it starts from a wrong guess and gradient steps move its place, turn, sizes, color and opacity toward the target outline, big steps first and then smaller ones, as in a real fit; a duck whose splats shrink to dots, and the back-to-front order splats are drawn in.

The photo view uses a real optimizer on 2,400 flat Gaussians, with checked compositing and loss derivatives. It is a single-image 2D fit, not a multi-view 3D reconstruction. The one-splat motion is prepared, and the sorting view has a reproducible distance-versus-depth error.

1. Correct

   A photo is fit using 2,400 optimized Gaussians.¹²

   The production fit count is 2,400. Independent pixel compositing agrees with the loss; finite differences agree with all 18 tested derivatives, and a small fit reduces its loss.

2. Simplified

   The training picture is a single-image 2D version of Gaussian fitting.¹²

   It optimizes position, two sizes, angle, color, and opacity in a flat photo plane, using Adam and cached frames; it does not optimize full 3D covariance from multiple views.

3. Simplified

   The one-splat view illustrates optimization with a prescribed path.³¹

   A shared factor (1−rate) to the step count reduces every target-parameter error for 24 steps, then forces zero. There is no rendered-image loss calculation in this view.

4. Being fixed

   The sorting view shows the renderer’s back-to-front order.⁴

   The bead order is sorted by Euclidean distance to a fixed camera rather than view-axis depth. The test finds pairs whose order disagrees with depth.

1. 13D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering, Kerbl, Kopanas, Leimkühler, and Drettakis, Inria
2. 2Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization, Kingma and Ba
3. 3Gradient descent, Dive into Deep Learning authors
4. 4Gaussian rasterizer depth, Kerbl and coauthors, official implementation

Simplified

The photo fit uses a reduced-resolution image and 2D parameters, caches its optimization, and replays keyframes. It does not infer a 3D scene from several cameras or adapt the splat count. The one-splat path follows prescribed parameter-error decay and snaps to the target at the end.

The back of the picture is this page's QR code: flip it, and point a phone at it. This link opens it in the Playground. To put it on your own page, add the element and one script tag. Every option.

https://splashery.app/play/?toy=gaussian-splatting

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