Habitat-GS: A High-Fidelity Navigation Simulator with Dynamic Gaussian Splatting
Authors: name: Ziyuan Xia, name: Jingyi Xu, name: Chong Cui, name: Yuanhong Yu, name: Jiazhao Zhang, name: Qingsong Yan, name: Tao Ni, name: Junbo Chen, name: Xiaowei Zhou, name: Hujun Bao, name: Ruizhen Hu, name: Sida Peng

Training embodied AI agents depends critically on the visual fidelity of simulation environments and the ability to model dynamic humans. Current simulators rely on mesh-based rasterization with limited visual realism, and their support for dynamic human avatars, where available, is constrained to mesh representations, hindering agent generalization to human-populated real-world scenarios. We present Habitat-GS, a navigation-centric embodied AI simulator extended from Habitat-Sim that integrates 3D Gaussian Splatting scene rendering and drivable gaussian avatars while maintaining full compatibility with the Habitat ecosystem. Our system implements a 3DGS renderer for real-time photorealistic rendering and supports scalable 3DGS asset import from diverse sources. For dynamic human modeling, we introduce a gaussian avatar module that enables each avatar to simultaneously serve as a photorealistic visual entity and an effective navigation obstacle, allowing agents to learn human-aware behaviors in realistic settings. Experiments on point-goal navigation demonstrate that agents trained on 3DGS scenes achieve stronger cross-domain generalization, with mixed-domain training being the most effective strategy. Evaluations on avatar-aware navigation further confirm that gaussian avatars enable effective human-aware navigation. Finally, performance benchmarks validate the system's scalability across varying scene complexity and avatar counts.