Explain user preference for 3DGS in the Bicycle scene

Determine the factors that led participants in the reported user study to slightly prefer 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) over the StopThePop hierarchical per-pixel sorted Gaussian splatting renderer specifically for the Mip-NeRF 360 Outdoor "Bicycle" scene when rating view-consistency and popping artifacts along identical camera paths.

Background

The paper presents a user paper with 18 participants comparing videos rendered by 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) and the proposed StopThePop renderer along identical camera paths. Participants rated view-consistency and popping artifacts, yielding an overall significant preference for the StopThePop method.

Despite the general preference for the proposed method, the authors note an exception: in the "Bicycle" scene from the Mip-NeRF 360 Outdoor dataset, participants slightly preferred 3DGS. The cause of this exception was not identified by the authors, motivating investigation into scene-specific or perceptual factors that could explain the preference.