Echoes of the Coliseum: Towards 3D Live streaming of Sports Events

Abstract

Human-centered live events have always played a pivotal role in shaping culture and fostering social connections. Traditional 2D live transmissions fail to replicate the immersive quality of physical attendance. Addressing this gap, this paper proposes LiveSplats , a framework towards real-time, photo-realistic 3D reconstructions of live events using high-performance 3D Gaussian Splatting. Our solution capitalizes on strong geometric priors to optimize through distributed processing and load balancing, enabling interactive, freely explorable 3D experiences. By dividing scene reconstruction into actor-centric and environment-specific tasks, we employ hierarchical coarse-to-fine optimization to rapidly and accurately reconstruct human actors based on pose data, refining their geometry and appearance with photometric loss. For static environments, we focus on view-dependent appearance changes, streamlining rendering efficiency and maximizing GPU performance. To facilitate evaluation, we introduce (and distribute) a synthetic benchmark dataset of basketball games, offering high visual fidelity as ground truth. In both our synthetic benchmark and publicly available benchmarks, LiveSplats consistently outperforms existing approaches. The dataset is available at https://humansensinglab.github.io/basket-multiview.