ProgressiveAvatars: Progressive Animatable 3D Gaussian Avatars

In practical real-time XR and telepresence applications, network and computing resources fluctuate frequently. Therefore, a progressive, streamable 3D representation method is needed that can be immediately deployed and continuously optimized as resources increase. To this end, we propose ProgressiveAvatars, a progressive avatar representation built on a hierarchy of 3D Gaussians grown byadaptive implicit subdivision on a template mesh. 3D Gaussians are defined in face‑local coordinates to remain animatable under varying expressions and head motion across multiple detail levels. The hierarchy expands when screen-space signals indicate a lack of detail, allocating resources to important areas. ProgressiveAvatars supports incremental loading rendering, adding new Gaussians as they arrive while preserving previous content, thus achieving smooth quality improvements across varying bandwidths. Thanks to our progressive representation method with an inherited tree structure, ProgressiveAvatars enables progressive delivery and progressive rendering under fluctuating network bandwidth and varying compute and memory resources.