Inference Ground Truth explores how machines and humans perceive and record reality. Modern philosophy tells us that true objectivity is impossible. Today’s culture and media often compare personal impressions of shared moments. But even what we seem to agree on is filtered through human perception. This project is a reminder of that deep subjectivity.
Inference Ground Truth is one of the two winning projects of the Ars Electronica Futurelab’s internal competition Ideas Expedition 2025. It is a continuation and evolution of one of the 2024 winning projects, Persistent Time Sink Resonance, that also experimented with the recent rasterization technique Gaussian Splatting.
Inference Ground Truth is space reshaped – an experiment in overlapping realities. It is a spatial setup using new methods of Gaussian Splatting to record volumetric traces of movement. The goal: to negotiate what ground truth might mean between human experience and machinic reality.
Building on Persistent Time Sink Resonance, the team now pushes further – technically and conceptually. They extend the use of 3D and 4D Gaussian Splatting as a tool to question what it means to capture motion. It is an exploration of how movement how movement can be rendered not just as temporal change but as a volumetric, data-driven aesthetic. The team members also aim to make the training process visible. To expose how machines learn from volumetric data. To make scanning and digitization tangible, transparent, and open to interpretation.
The visual language draws from the tradition of slit-scan art. The capture volume becomes a layered structure – where space and time are superimposed into spatialized imprints of movement. We drift toward ground truth, knowing we may never fully arrive, but seeing value in the attempt.
At the Ars Electronica Festival 2025, visitors are invited to become part of the artwork, as interactive participants in a capture volume – with various aspects of the capture and processing cycle depicted on screen, resulting in 4D Gaussian Splats.
This project is part of the Open Futurelab at the Ars Electronica Festival 2025.
Credits
Ars Electronica Futurelab: Johannes Pöll, Raphael Schaumburg-Lippe, Simon Schmid
Inference Ground Truth is a winning project of the Ars Electronica Futurelab Ideas Expedition 2025