This week felt like the “finale chapter” of our VOXEL O2A journey, centered around our final System-Level Design Review (SLDR). The afternoon began with a networking session from 1–3 PM, where a liaison sat at our table and spoke candidly about what life looks like in the real world beyond the classroom. Instead of talking about our specific project, he focused on broader themes: how expectations change when you enter industry, the importance of reliability and consistency, and why skills like communication, accountability, and learning quickly on the job matter just as much as technical knowledge. Hearing about challenges such as handling ambiguity, working with diverse teams, and managing deadlines gave us a clearer picture of what it really means to be ready to work, not just technically strong.

From 3–5 PM, we shifted into our final SLDR presentation. As a team, we walked the audience through our full pipeline story – starting from a simple phone capture and moving through segmentation, 3D reconstruction, mesh and texture generation, and finally into Unity, where assets can be viewed, rotated, and inspected and also we had the exciting opportunity to demo our working prototype, showcasing our end-to-end pipeline that transforms standard video footage into 3D meshes using Gaussian Splatting. It was incredibly rewarding to see the pipeline in action successfully processing the “Gator” video from segmentation to mesh extraction and to receive validation that our progress is well ahead of the curve for this stage of the project.

Beyond the technical success, the highlight of the day was undoubtedly the human connection. We finally had the chance to meet our liaisons, in person after weeks of remote collaboration, which added a great dynamic to our discussions about future use cases and optimizations. The event was a fantastic experience overall. it was fun networking with new people, sharing our work with a broader audience, and celebrating the solid foundation we’ve built as we head into the next phase of development.

This week was all about our PR System-Level Design Review (SLDR) for the VOXEL O2A pipeline. We presented alongside four other IPPD teams, our coaches, and the TA, so it felt more like a mini conference than a regular class review. As a team, we walked everyone through how a simple phone capture travels through our pipeline from object isolation and 3D reconstruction all the way to Unity-ready assets. People responded well to the way we framed O2A as a complete, mobile first workflow rather than a single demo, and several reviewers specifically highlighted our clear module breakdown, error-handling strategy, and focus on turning research ideas into something a real user could actually touch and use.

The overall tone of the feedback was very encouraging. Reviewers felt we had a solid foundation and a realistic plan for where the system is headed next. The main suggestions were to simplify our architecture slide so that the core data flow pops out more clearly at a glance, and to spell out our testing plan in a more structured way what datasets we’ll use, which metrics (like PSNR, SSIM, runtime) we’ll report, and how we’ll compare against baselines such as NeRF and COLMAP. Both of these feel more like polishing than major rework, which boosted our confidence that we’re on the right track.

Looking ahead, we want to convert this momentum into concrete upgrades. We plan to redesign the architecture slide with cleaner visuals, then expand our SLDR document to clearly describe our evaluation pipeline, baselines, and Spring 2026 testing roadmap. In parallel, we’ll keep strengthening the technical side: stabilizing our mesh and texture pipeline, experimenting with Poisson/Ball Pivoting, running 3D Gaussian Splatting on benchmark datasets, and tightening our Unity-based visualization so people can freely rotate and inspect our reconstructed assets. Overall, this SLDR made VOXEL O2A feel less like a one-time prototype and more like a product-ready pipeline in progress, and that’s a direction we’re excited to keep building toward.

This week, our team participated in the Peer Design Review (PDR) session, where we presented our complete O2A pipeline to other IPPD teams. The feedback was very positive, many appreciated the technical depth of our project and the end-to-end structure of the pipeline. The discussion also gave us valuable insights and suggestions to refine our presentation for the official PDR next week.

On the technical side, we made exciting progress exploring new models for Structure-from-Motion (SfM). We tested the DUSt3R model and successfully visualized 3D point clouds, which was an incredible milestone seeing our captured objects reconstructed in 3D gave a real sense of the pipeline coming together.

We also began experimenting with a new method for object isolation using depth extraction techniques to separate the main object from the background. This step will be crucial for improving reconstruction quality and making the pipeline more robust to real-world scenes.

As we continue testing, we’re gaining a clearer understanding of the full pipeline flow, identifying edge cases, challenges, and opportunities for improvement. Each iteration is helping us fine-tune the process and move closer to a seamless, mobile-to-3D asset creation experience.