Radiance Fields in XR: A Survey on How Radiance Fields are Envisioned and Addressed for XR Research

IEEE Transaction on Visualization and Computer Graphics (TVCG)
Special Issue ISMAR 2025 (To Appear)

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ke portrait
Ke Li
University of Hamburg
mana portrait
Mana Masuda
Keio University
susanne portrait
Susanne Schmidt
University of Canterbury
shohei portrait
Shohei Mori
University of Stuttgart
li_tvcg25_teaser.jpg
We observe a gap between the anticipated interests in RF-related technologies expected to advance new XR applications (left) and the actual interests that are considered the main factors in XR (right). This survey paper investigates and discusses how RF technologies, including NeRF and 3DGS, are envisioned for XR (i.e., XR-Envisioned) and how they are actually implemented for XR (i.e., XR-Addressed) in scientific papers from XR, HCI, CV, CG, Robotics, and MM communities via systematic review.

Abstract The development of radiance fields (RF), such as 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) and Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF), has revolutionized interactive photorealistic view synthesis and presents enormous opportunities for XR research and applications. However, despite the exponential growth of RF research, RF-related contributions to the XR community remain sparse. To better understand this research gap, we performed a systematic survey of current RF literature to analyze (i) how RF is envisioned for XR applications, (ii) how they have already been implemented, and (iii) the remaining research gaps. We collected \(365\) RF contributions related to XR from computer vision, computer graphics, robotics, multimedia, human-computer interaction, and XR communities, seeking to answer the above research questions. Among the \(365\) papers, we performed an analysis of \(66\) papers that already addressed a detailed aspect of RF research for XR. With this survey, we extended and positioned XR-specific RF research topics in the broader RF research field and provide a helpful resource for the XR community to navigate within the rapid development of RF research.

BibTex 
@article{li_tvcg25,
    author={Li, Ke and Masuda, Mana and Schmidt, Susanne and Mori, Shohei},
    journal={IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (TVCG)}, 
    title={Radiance Fields in XR: A Survey on How Radiance Fields are Envisioned and Addressed for XR Research}, 
    volume={},
    number={},
    pages={},
    year={2025}
}

Acknowledgement This work was supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) under Germany's Excellence Strategy – EXC 2120/1 – 390831618, the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation program under grant agreement No 101135025, PRESENCE project, and the MSCA Staff Exchanges project PLACES (grant agreement No 101086206). Early drafts of this submission were rephrased for clarity and grammatical correctness using OpenAI's GPT-4o model and Microsoft Copilot.