# From Far and Near: Perceptual Evaluation of Crowd Representations Across Levels of Detail

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.20558 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.20558/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 9 of its 29 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Oct 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04079/) (2023)
- [Instant Neural Graphics Primitives with a Multiresolution Hash Encoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05989/) (2022)
- [4D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Dynamic Scene Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08528/) (2023)
- [PlenOctrees for Real-time Rendering of Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14024/) (2021)
- [Mip-Splatting: Alias-free 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16493/) (2023)
- [LP-3DGS: Learning to Prune 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.18784/) (2024)
- [CrowdSplat: Exploring Gaussian Splatting For Crowd Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.17792/) (2025)
- [Evaluating CrowdSplat: Perceived Level of Detail for Gaussian Crowds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.17085/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this paper, we investigate how users perceive the visual quality of crowd character representations at different levels of detail (LoD) and viewing distances. Each representation, including geometric meshes, image-based impostors, Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs), and 3D Gaussians, exhibits distinct trade-offs between visual fidelity and computational performance. Our qualitative and quantitative results provide insights to guide the design of perceptually optimized LoD strategies for crowd rendering.