Preprint: City-scale Motion Planning in Radiance Fields for Generating Virtual Walk-Throughs

Abstract

In this work, we explore the deployment of city-scale 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) scenes for the creation of visually appealing virtual routes. We present an automated virtual route planner that creates smooth, obstacle-free paths between user-defined start and end points. These paths can be used to create first-person walk-throughs rendered within the 3DGS environment, enabling intuitive exploration of complex environments. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our implementation across various test scenes, highlighting its ability to consistently generate collision-free and smooth paths. We evaluate eight path planning algorithms on two 3DGS scenes considering success rate (SR), path planning time and path length. The results show that our system achieves a 100% SR across two different test scenes, matching or exceeding the performance of state-of-the art methods.