For people of my generation the term Splat will always be associated with the Saturday Morning Children’s TV show ‘Tiswas” and was to the result of someone getting a “custard pie” in their face…
Now the hot topic in 3D Geospatial rendering are Gaussian Splats..
In Geospatial 3D, Gaussian splats are used as for rendering and representing surfaces, particularly in point-based rendering techniques. Unlike traditional polygon-based methods, which use vertices and edges to define a surface, Gaussian splats represent the surface as a collection of points or particles, each with an associated Gaussian function.
This function is typically a bell-shaped curve, which spreads out in space, creating a smooth, continuous representation of the surface.
The advantage of Gaussian splats is that they can represent complex, organic shapes and soft surfaces without the need for explicit mesh structures, as a result this is an alternative to most of the 3D techniques used in Geospatial Technology so far..
Moreover, Gaussian splats are valuable in managing large datasets, such as those found when working with large point clouds. Since each splat is a smooth approximation of the surface at that point, it allows for efficient rendering, even with millions of points.
Overall, Gaussian splats provide a flexible and efficient approach to 3D rendering, offering smooth approximations of surfaces with minimal computational overhead.
To try out both the capture and rendering abilities of Gaussian Splats I used the recently developed iPhone App Scaniverse from Niantic (yes the Pokemon GO people!) on a riverside walk to capture a large sculpture at Runnymede on the banks of the River Thames called “The Jurors”. The scan using my iPhone took about 5 minutes and the results are very impressive.
This is still very early days for the technology, but it’s nice to see some innovation in the 3D visualisation space, Niantic have a vision to map the world using Scaniverse, that’s quite a challenge but then so was Google Earth !