Turn a single image into a navigable 3D Gaussian Splat with depth

[ytpete]

https://x.com/revelium_studio/status/2009570090568577045

[smusamashah]

If this model is so good at estimating depth from single image, shouldn't it also be able to take multiple images as input and estimate even better? But searching a bit it looks like this is supposed to be a single image to 3D only. I don't understand why it does not (can not?) work with multiple images.

[milleramp]

It's using Apple's SHARP method, which is monocular. https://apple.github.io/ml-sharp/

[MillionOClock]

I also feel like an heavily multimodal model could be very nice for this: allow multiple images from various angles, optionally some true depth data even if imperfect (like what a basic phone LIDAR would output), why not even photos of the same place even if it comes from other sources at other times (just to gather more data), and based on that generate a 3D scene you can explore, using generative AI for filling with plausible content what is missing.

[voodooEntity]

If you have multiple images you could use photogrammetry.

At the end, if you want to "fill in the blanks" llm will always "make up" stuff, based on all of its training data.

With a technology like photogrammetry you can get much better results, therefor if you have multiple angled images and dont really need to make up stuff, its better to use such

[shrinks99]

I'm going to guess this is because the image to depth data, while good, is not perfectly accurate and therefore cannot be a shared ground truth between multiple images. At that point what you want is a more traditional structure from motion workflow, which already exists and does a decent job.

[echelon]

Also, are we allowed to use this model? Apple had a very restrictive licence, IIRC?

[SequoiaHope]

Multi-view approaches tend to have a very different pipeline.

[brk]

Tried a few random images and scenes, overall wasn't that impressive. Maybe I'm using the wrong kinds of input images or something, but for the most part once I moved more than a small amount, the rendering was mostly noise. To be fair, I didn't really expect much more.

Neat demo, but feels like things need to come quite a ways to make this interesting.

[mawadev]

Stuck at 90% forever..

[verytrivial]

My understanding of JavaScript is cursory, but my reading of that webpage is the UI is just smoke and mirrors, and it is just waiting for the whole thing to be processed in a single remote API call to some back-end system. If the back-end is down, it will always stop at 90%. The crawling progress bar is fake with canned messages updated with Math.Random() delays. Gives you something to look at, I guess, but seems a little misleading. Might be wrong ...

[james2doyle]

I think this one is better: https://huggingface.co/spaces/ronedgecomb/ml-sharp

[colordrops]

Fails for me with:

    '_Function' object has no attribute '_snapshotted'

[someguyiguess]

Same for me as well. Probably ran out of API token credits when everyone on HN started loading it.

[lastdong]

I was wondering if it was running locally… 90% stuck

[eps]

Yup, same here.

[bigtones]

Same here. It just times out.

[M4R5H4LL]

Same for me

[tripplyons]

Same here

[Johnny_Bonk]

Cool, is there a way to upload several photos of a room from different angles to fuse it all together? Is there an api?

[riotnrrd]

That's a pretty well-solved problem at this point, if you want to do it yourself. You'll want some kind of NeRF tool and a way to calculate the camera poses of the photos you took. COLMAP is the tool most people use for the latter.

I'd recommend trying Instant Neural Graphics Primitives (https://github.com/NVlabs/instant-ngp) from NVIDIA. It's a couple years old, so not state-of-the-art, but it runs on just about anything and is extremely fast.

[carlosjobim]

That is the entire science of photogrammetry. Which has made tremendous progress in the past 10 years. There's many tools which will do it for you.

[j2kun]

Would be useful to have the website say something, _anything_ about what this is doing besides asking you to upload an image.

[personjerry]

This is just Apple's tool plus a splat viewing library? Perhaps disingenuous to call "our web app"

This is the heavy lifting: https://github.com/apple/ml-sharp

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46284658

[vunderba]

Yeah I think you're right. It calls that out (in really tiny footer text) that it's leveraging ml-sharp.

It's pretty trivial to get running locally and generating the PLY files. Spark's a pretty good renderer for it after you've generated the gaussian splats.

https://github.com/sparkjsdev/spark

[nmstoker]

Gets stuck at 84% each time - seems wasteful to let it get that far!

[methuselah_in]

Thrown 2 images didn't nothing just a error

[mightysashiman]

Conveniently fails to start processing

[voodooEntity]

Its funny, always stucks on 90% till it fails with the error that another big image may be keeping the server busy.

I mean ok its a "demo" tho the funny thing is if you actually check the cli and requests, you clearly can see that the 3 stages the images walks through on "processing" are fake, its just doing 1 post request in the backend that runs while it traverses through the states, and at 90% it stops until (in theory) the request ends.

[hahahahhaah]

Oh it's an IE6 progress bar then.

[fenwick67]

When I saw the progress bar moving so smoothly I knew it was BS lol

[xnx]

Or one-click install on your own device: https://pinokio.co/item.html?uri=https%3A%2F%2Fgithub.com%2F...

[causal]

What is Pinokio? The website just says "Your PC is the Cloud" - what?