virtual reality engineers

Abstract: Current world models for explicit world simulation typically follow two distinct pathways: (1) video generative models (e.g., Sora), which simulate realistic appearances but fail to preserve 3D consistency; and (2) 3D generative models (e.g., Marble), which generate geometrically consistent scenes but often yield static, less realistic observations. We present AEON, a unified framework that bridges video-based and 3D-based world models and combines the benefits of both. The key insight of AEON lies in a generative model that operates within the text- or image-conditioned video latent space while producing renderable 4D graphics primitives---specifically, 4D Gaussian Splatting (4DGS)---as the explicit world representation. We train a 4D reconstruction model to predict both 4DGS and camera poses from monocular videos, serving as our initialized 4D decoder. Furthermore, we design a domain adapter that translates generative video latents into reconstructive 4D latents through a distillation process on the video VAE. AEON naturally supports video-based world modeling by rendering 4DGS at predicted camera trajectories, and constructs a persistent 4D environment with scene dynamics for realistic world simulation. Consequently, AEON empowers a diverse range of world modeling applications and achieves state-of-the-art performance on standard benchmarks. Project Page: https://weiqi-zhang.github.io/AEON

Abstract: Electrotactile stimulation, as a haptic feedback method, often struggles to evoke high-quality natural sensations. Consequently, despite its practical advantages, it is generally less preferred in human-machine systems than mechanical approaches. In this paper, we propose a bio-inspired stimulation framework that generates signals modelled on afferent neural activity derived from a touch model. By producing more biologically plausible spiking patterns, the proposed approach aims to enhance the realism of perceived tactile sensations. To evaluate these stimulation patterns in a realistic task context and to quantify the influence of visual and movement cues, we conducted a series of subjective experiments under three conditions. The results indicate that bio-inspired modulation was effective: in particular, bio-inspired co-modulation of amplitude and frequency achieved a favourable pressure-irritation trade-off, increasing the probability of perceiving pressure while maintaining low irritation (pressure: 0.78; irritation: 0.24) relative to the other patterns. Visual cues and hand movement further improved feedback quality by significantly increasing the probability of reporting pressure (p$<$0.001) without a corresponding increase in irritation, and by increasing mean naturalness ratings. Overall, these findings demonstrate the potential of bio-inspired electrotactile patterns to improve haptic feedback quality, and highlight the importance of evaluating such methods under realistic, multimodal interaction scenarios.

Abstract: Diffusion-based world models enable high-quality interactive environment generation but suffer from substantial inference overhead due to repeated Transformer evaluations during denoising. Existing caching methods mainly exploit temporal redundancy at the feature or token level, leaving the underlying mathematical structure of diffusion features largely unexplored. In this work, we reveal that world-model features exhibit highly stable singular subspaces across nearby denoising steps, while their singular values follow predictable evolution patterns. Building on this observation, we propose SpectralCache, a training-free spectral caching framework that reuses stable singular subspaces and estimates only low-dimensional singular values through linear extrapolation. We further exploit the spectral consistency between neighboring full-computation features to skip selected expensive backbone evaluations via singular value scaling. Extensive experiments on representative world models demonstrate that SpectralCache consistently improves inference efficiency while preserving generation quality. On HunyuanWorld-Voyager-13B, SpectralCache achieves 5.22x acceleration while maintaining a WorldScore of 65.90 for static scenes, substantially outperforming existing training-free caching methods in inference efficiency.

Abstract: Interactive world models must respond quickly to controls while preserving scene consistency. Existing acceleration methods can miss heterogeneous control responses and spatial transport when recovering skipped features. We observe that interaction-induced feature changes correlate with approximation error, while low-frequency interpolation errors are phase-sensitive and show more predictable phase progression. These findings motivate CAST, a reconstruction-coupled inference framework. CAST selects anchors by interaction sensitivity and cross-layer coverage, reconstructs skipped residuals with frequency- and confidence-aware Phase-Aware Reconstruction (PAR), and coordinates historical KV routing according to downstream reconstruction responsibility. On Matrix-Game 3.0 and HY-World 1.5, CAST achieves 2.15x and 3.48x speedups, respectively, while maintaining visual quality close to Native (Figure 1). It also attains the highest VBench scores among compared methods and leads non-native baselines on seven and six of thirteen WorldMark dimensions, demonstrating a balance of generation speed, visual quality, and interactive responsiveness under real-time control. Code is available at https://github.com/lokiniuniu/CAST.

Abstract: Real-time dense SLAM is a core capability for robotics applications that require robust localization and high- quality mapping in dynamic or fast-changing environments. Recent 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS)-based SLAM methods have shown promising performance, but most are designed for narrow-FoV pinhole cameras, where limited angular coverage weakens pose observability and often leads to unstable photo- metric optimization under rapid motion and large viewpoint changes. We present PanoGS-SLAM, the first panoramic dense SLAM system built on 3D Gaussian Splatting. Our method per- forms differentiable rendering and pose optimization directly in the spherical domain, enabling omnidirectional photometric constraints for more stable tracking. To improve geometric consistency and robustness, we introduce (1) a sphere-consistent photometric loss that compensates for the area distortion of equirectangular projection, and (2) a depth-guided Gaussian initialization strategy that stabilizes incremental mapping in newly observed regions. Extensive experiments on both real and synthetic panoramic benchmarks (PALVIO and SynPano) show that PanoGS-SLAM consistently outperforms geometric and GS-based baselines in tracking accuracy and rendering quality, while achieving fast front-end convergence and real-time perfor- mance. In addition, controlled field-of-view experiments reveal a clear monotonic improvement in optimization conditioning and convergence stability as angular coverage increases, high- lighting the fundamental role of sensing geometry in shaping the optimization landscape of differentiable Gaussian-based SLAM. The source code will be made publicly available.