SIGGRAPH 2026: Global-Scale Photorealism with Google Immersive View XR

This talk chronicles the engineering and design journey of bringing Google Maps Immersive View to standalone XR. We detail the unique challenges of rendering this fully navigable, global-scale environment on constrained headsets. Highlighting rendering optimizations for 3D Tiles and 3D Gaussian Splatting, intuitive hands-only gestural navigation, and adaptive spatial audio, we reveal how to achieve performant photorealism and active user presence on next-generation XR hardware. #googleemployee