A Recipe for Generating 3D Worlds from a Single Image

Katja Schwarz, Denis Rozumny, Samuel Rota Bulò, Lorenzo Porzi, Peter Kontschieder; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2025, pp. 3520-3530

We introduce a recipe for generating immersive 3D worlds from a single image by framing the task as an in-context learning problem for 2D inpainting models. This approach requires minimal training and uses existing generative models. Our process involves two steps: generating coherent panoramas using a pre-trained diffusion model and lifting these into 3D with a metric depth estimator. We then fill unobserved regions by conditioning the inpainting model on rendered point clouds, requiring minimal fine-tuning. Tested on both synthetic and real images, our method produces high-quality 3D environments suitable for VR display. By explicitly modeling the 3D structure of the generated environment from the start, our approach consistently outperforms state-of-the-art, video synthesis-based methods along multiple quantitative image quality metrics.