Web of Virtual Soils

Virtual Soils Library

A library of all publicly available Radiance Fields. This library includes fields that are not on the soil map.

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Why Virtual Soils?

Soils are all around us. Whether we're in the city, or in the countryside there is soil somewhere near to us. In planters or parks, fields or forests. When teaching, or learning about soil finding it isn't the problem, the problem is accessing the diversity. As soil formation is impacted by the five soil formation factors Climate, Organisms, Relief, Parent Material, and Time (ClORPT), and these factors vary on the scale of landscapes. This leads to soils varying on the scale of landscapes, which therefore necessitates the need for a varity of tools to communicate about the diversity of soils.

Within soil science there are already many powerful tools for education and communication. Photos, videos, physical and digital soil monoliths, field courses, conference presentations, and many more. They all have an important place, but Radiance Fields can add something more.

Photos and videos of soil are above all else one of the most accessible forms for sharing soils. Photos and videos are ubiquitous in the world, and high quality photos of soil have never been as available as they are today. At times they can capture more detail than our eyes, and can be sent instantly across the world. The greatest strength of photos and videos though is their lack of interactivity. As viewers you cannot explore beyond the frame.

Soil monoliths are another excellent tool for soil science communication, and education. They can bring remote soils into class rooms, or museums for people to observe, and in some cases, interact with. However, they are limited by their cost of production, and delicate nature. This has been addressed by Krzic et al. with the creation of the Virtual Monolith Collection that first used photos of the monoliths (2010, 2013), and was later upgraded with 3D models available on SketchFab (2020).

Field courses are the final level, and gold standard of soil science education and communication. Experiencing the environment of soil allows for the greatest understanding of the context of the soil, and enables us to truly connect with the soil, and landscape. Field courses however are limited by physical access to remote locations, and complex logistics required to move large groups of people around.

Radiance fields for soil science are part of a novel opportunity to expand the tools available for soil science communication, and education. Building upon advancements in GPU compute power, machine learning, and 3D reconstruction radiance fields using 3D Gaussian splats allow for complete reconstructions of soils, and their surrounding environments. These reconstructed environments can build upon previous success with online soil education resources, such as the Virtual Monolith Collection, to create an online resource of soils, and their environmental contexts.

The first step to implementing radiance fields in soil science is to create an accessible web experience which lets the people view wide range of soils. Researchers could share radiance fields of the soils they are working in, giving others a new level of capability for experiencing the environments that others are working with. Students can use it as a tool for learning, building soil ID skills, and an understanding of how soils, landscapes, and people are deeply intertwined.

The next step is to create a desktop application & PC-VR ready Virtual Soils application, that allows anyone with a VR ready PC to go and truly experience the soils. To be able to meet with someone halfway across the world, and to discuss "in the field" about the soils at their feet. To share knowledge, collaboratively, in a completely new way.

The Concept for PC-VR based Virtual Soils:

What are Radiance Fields and Gaussian Splats?

Radiance fields are a volumetric approach to the digital reconstruction of real-world environments, landscapes, and objects using photogrammetric methods, and techniques. Volumetric reconstructions apply clouds of many individual points to reconstruct objects, and spaces. This differs fromm mesh based reconstructions which use triangles, and 2D images for digital reconstructions.

Research on volumetric reconstructions has had several large advancements in recent years, including work by Mildenhall et al. (2020) which combined view dependent properties, and machine learning, and more recently 3D Gaussian splats by Kerbl et al. (2023) which allow for the real-time rendering of Gaussian splats on a wide range of devices.

3D Gaussian splats themselves are 3 dimensional points in space with properties for colour and transparency and spherical harmonics that contain view dependent properties, such as reflections. These points can be squashed and stretched, and added and removed as part of a machine learning process that iteratively refines the

The radiance fields on this website currently utilise 3D Gaussian splats trained within Lichtfeld Studio on a Nvidia RTX 3080 10GB after capture on either an iPhone 13 or a Sony Alpha ZV-E10 with Sony E PZ 10-20mm F4 G. Radiance fields however can be captured on nearly any device with great success.

Currently on amywells.ca the 3D Gaussian splat based radiance fields are rendered within a WebGL 3D Viewer created by Kevin Kwok with edits by Erfolgreich Charismatisch and Amy Wells to improve the controls.

Project Next Steps

Current work on the Virtual Soils project is focusing on ways to enhance the web viewer experience, with the objective of making the project more interactive, and scalable to a much larger extent. This work is being done in collaboration with the UBC Emerging Media Lab as part of a Small Teaching and Learning Enhancement Fund project.

Future work on this project will include (1) further validation of the capture method, (2) the publishing of the method and associated resources as an open-access academic paper, (3) the application of these reconstructed environments and soils for soil science education and science communication and more!

If you want to get in contact about the Virtual Soils project please email me at amys2001@student.ubc.ca!