Project Case Study

2D Gaussian Splatting Viewer

Open-source 3D ToolingReleased 2024

Project Overview

I built the 2D Gaussian Splatting Viewer to turn a research release into a workflow people could inspect, edit, and extend. The original implementation produced a new surface-oriented representation, but diagnosing a reconstruction still required separate scripts and one-off visualizations.

The Viser application brought training, renderer diagnostics, scene editing, transforms, camera paths, and mesh export into one interface. It grew from a personal debugging tool into a public utility for the 2DGS community.

Core contributions

  • Built and maintained a broadly adopted public Viser workflow for 2DGS.
  • Connected live training with RGB, normal, depth, distortion, edge, and curvature diagnostics.
  • Implemented crop, edit/save, rigid transforms, camera-path preview, and mesh export.

Key Features

Rendering diagnostics

RGB, edge, normal, depth, distortion, and curvature outputs share one rendering suite.

Training inside the viewer

Training, camera navigation, and intermediate render modes share one application.

Crop and general controls

Crop regions, point-cloud display, disk visualization, and render-path preview remain synchronized.

Editing and mesh export

Users can edit and save splats, then export the surface as a mesh.

Rigid scene transforms

Position, rotation, and scale can be adjusted in place.

Open Source

The repository has evolved through more than one hundred commits and attracted over 160 GitHub stars.

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