Voyager: Real-Time Splatting City-Scale 3D Gaussians on Your Phone

Abstract: 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) is an emerging technique for photorealistic 3D scene rendering. However, rendering city-scale 3DGS scenes on mobile devices, e.g., your smartphones, remains a significant challenge due to the limited resources on mobile devices. A natural solution is to offload computation to the cloud; however, naively streaming rendered frames from the cloud to the client introduces high latency and requires bandwidth far beyond the capacity of current wireless networks. In this paper, we propose an effective solution to enable city-scale 3DGS rendering on mobile devices. Our key insight is that, under normal user motion, the number of newly visible Gaussians per second remains roughly constant. Leveraging this, we stream only the necessary Gaussians to the client. Specifically, on the cloud side, we propose asynchronous level-of-detail search to identify the necessary Gaussians for the client. On the client side, we accelerate rendering via a lookup table-based rasterization. Combined with holistic runtime optimizations, our system can deliver low-latency, city-scale 3DGS rendering on mobile devices. Compared to existing solutions, Voyager achieves over 100$\times$ reduction on data transfer and up to 8.9$\times$ speedup while retaining comparable rendering quality.