Towards the Immersive Web

As part of my investigation into immersive presence, I have been coming up to speed with Gaussian Splats, a relatively new approach to 3D graphics that replaces traditional triangles with fuzzy volumes.  I put together a simple demo to show the feasibility for rendering splats in WebGPU with material based lighting (PBR) and shadows. This points to the advantages of Gaussian Splats in neural network models due to their inherent differentiability.

For a stunning demo of splats, see https://superspl.at/scene/cf6ac78e

and also a background paper with demos at https://repo-sam.inria.fr/fungraph/3d-gaussian-splatting/

My demo is much simpler and shows a T-posed sponge-like figure: https://www.w3.org/2026/splat/

The T-pose is a common starting point for animating avatars by updating the joints of their skeletons, and in turn distorting their skins as they move their arms and legs. I want to apply browser-based AI to enabling the immersive web.  You can read more about the approach at:

	https://github.com/w3c/cogai/blob/master/Immersive-Web/Immersive-Presence.md

The research challenge is to make lifelike avatars that look and move like you do in the real world!

Best regards,

Dave Raggett <dsr@w3.org>