augmented reality app builders

Abstract: Online 3D Gaussian mapping enables fast and high-fidelity novel view synthesis, with broad applications in augmented reality, robotics, and autonomous systems. However, many current methods assume static scenes or filter out dynamics as outliers. In this paper, we study in-view scene changes where objects are manipulated in front of the camera within a single online sequence, unlike prior works that detect changes outside the camera view or between separate captures. This setting entangles transient and persistent dynamics, as objects can be distractors while moving and persistent once they settle. While recent studies start to address distractors by removing them for clean static background, in-view scene changes remain underexplored. To resolve this, we present SettleSplat, a monocular mapping system that maintains up-to-date 3D Gaussian maps under such changes. Specifically, we lift coarse per-pixel uncertainty into Gaussian dynamicity field, then prune transient ones. For persistent changes, we derive geometric contradictions weighted by parameter-free rendered depth uncertainty to separate true changes from under-optimized regions. On Bonn and Co-Fusion, SettleSplat achieves consistent 3D Gaussian maps, outperforming current baselines on both full images and change regions while maintaining comparable speed.

Abstract: Object goal navigation requires an embodied agent to locate and reach target objects in complex environments. Humans often rely on low-cost yet informative schematic maps, such as rough sketches or directional annotations. We develop a workflow for schematic-guided embodied navigation with two components: a training-data generation pipeline and ScheNav, a closed-loop navigation framework. Our lightweight data-generation pipeline turns 2D floorplans into navigation training environments, yielding Furnished-RPLAN, a dataset of over 33k furnished layouts with paired navigation episodes and noise-controllable schematic maps. ScheNav turns rough schematic guidance into exploration and stopping decisions by using SchemaField, a learned spatial module that fuses the guidance with accumulated observations and predicts spatial value fields. The framework updates these fields as exploration proceeds, with trajectory-based training and a cross-frame consistency objective supporting coherent guidance across changing viewpoints. ScheNav learns to use schematic guidance entirely from simulated floorplans and transfers this ability to unseen embodied environments. Experiments show improved navigation success and path efficiency across schematic maps, goal ellipses, and pointed directions, together with tolerance to the tested schematic perturbations and omissions. Together, these results demonstrate that rough schematic guidance offers a practical way to improve embodied navigation.

Abstract: Feed-forward geometric foundation models (GFMs) directly predict dense geometry and camera poses from batches of images. Emerging visual SLAM methods chain together consecutive GFM batches to form dense point cloud maps. A core challenge is how to address the ambiguous geometric scale of GFM predictions: independent predictions are locally consistent up-to-scale but not constrained by any direct physical measurements. Models trained on data with known scale improve the consistency of GFM reconstructions but again do not directly measure it. Consequently, trajectories and 3D reconstructions from GFM-enabled SLAM methods inherit this issue. Motivated by parallels with classical visual-inertial odometry, we introduce FoundationVIO which integrates inertial sensing with GFM predictions to recover metric scale reconstruction using a factor-graph based approach. We demonstrate odometry estimates competitive with classical state-of-the-art VIO methods and accurate dense reconstructions that outperform GFM-enabled SLAM methods. We also add a minimal GFM-based loop-closure mechanism to create a full Visual-Inertial SLAM system capable of creating globally accurate reconstructions and pose estimates. We evaluate our method on three datasets with well known sensor systems and demonstrate its compatibility on ubiquitous camera and IMU sensors. The method runs at approximately real-time on a consumer-grade laptop GPU. Code: https://github.com/ori-drs/FoundationVIO.