Instant Skinned Gaussian Avatars Achieve 240 FPS Real-Time Rendering, Revolutionizing Digital Human Creation

A groundbreaking new system, "Instant Skinned Gaussian Avatars for Web, Mobile and VR Applications," has been unveiled, promising to transform the creation and animation of 3D avatars. Developed by researchers Naruya Kondo, Yuto Asano, and Yoichi Ochiai, this innovative technology enables the rapid generation of photo-realistic 3D avatars with unprecedented efficiency and performance, targeting broad applications across web, mobile, and virtual reality platforms. The project was recently submitted to arXiv and featured at the SUI 2025 Demo Track.

The core innovation lies in its efficient animation of Gaussian Splatting representations. As explained by MrNeRF on social media, the system animates a background 3D mesh, with "the Gaussian splats follow the mesh’s vertices." This process involves assigning splats to mesh vertices and storing their relative transformations during preprocessing, allowing for instant use in applications without further computational overhead. At runtime, the system dynamically updates Gaussian splats in parallel and resorts them every frame based on the viewer's perspective.

This method significantly streamlines the avatar creation pipeline. From smartphone-based 3D scanning to on-device preprocessing, the entire process takes approximately five minutes, with the avatar generation step itself completed in just about 30 seconds. This speed marks a considerable improvement over previous approaches that often required extensive camera arrays, lengthy preprocessing times, or high-end GPUs, making 3D avatar creation more accessible to everyday users.

Performance benchmarks highlight the system's robust capabilities across various devices. The technology achieves 40-50 frames per second (fps) on an iPhone 13 Pro and an impressive 240 fps on a laptop equipped with an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Laptop GPU, capped by the display refresh rate. This real-time, cross-platform performance positions Instant Skinned Gaussian Avatars as a leading solution for seamless integration into social media, gaming, and metaverse applications, where high-fidelity, accessible, and real-time 3D avatars are increasingly in demand.