PhD researcher · UCLLondon, UK

Changrui Zhu

Spatial computing · Extended reality · Cognitive science · 3D vision

I build systems for understanding and interacting with physical, reconstructed, and virtual environments. My work brings together 3D vision, VR/MR development, and studies of human perception, from reconstructing scenes and detecting change to how people compare and understand them.

I am a PhD researcher at University College London, supervised by Prof. Simon Julier. Before UCL, I studied Electronic and Electrical Engineering at the University of Glasgow.

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Every space exists between the memory of what it was and the possibility of what it might become.

Selected work

MR-Compare

The research foundation of Unity XR 3DGS Toolkit: VR rendering and spatially grounded mixed-reality interaction on Meta Quest.

IEEE ISMAR 2026 · TVCG Paper

Best Paper Award · Honorable Mention ↗

Registration · 3DGS · Interaction

Meta Quest 3 · 30-participant study

Explore the project Get the Unity toolkit

Conceptual diagram of MR-Compare connecting the physical world, 3D Gaussian Splatting, and video see-through

Selected work

Learning from Edits for Online Scene Change Detection

Learn what change looks like from automatic 3D Gaussian edits, then update the evidence as new views arrive.

3D Gaussian Splatting · Bayesian inference

Changrui Zhu · Simon Julier

Explore the project

Offline learning from reference edits and change labels, followed by online fusion of current evidence, 3D history and the scene prior to detect changes

Publication collection

Latest three records

Recent publications

View all publications

2026arXivPreprint

Learning from Automatic 3D Gaussian Splatting Edits for Online Bayesian Scene Change Detection

Changrui Zhu, Simon Julier

2026IEEE ISMAR 2026IEEE TVCG Special Issue

MR-Compare: A Mixed-Reality Framework for Spatially Grounded Visual Comparison of 3D Gaussian Splatting and Mesh Reconstructions with the Physical Environment

Best Paper Award · Honorable Mention

Changrui Zhu, Ernst Kruijff, Pengju Zhang, Simon Julier

2026DisplaysJournal article

Does display type matter for change detection? Comparing immersive and non-immersive displays under low and high semantic availability

Changrui Zhu, Ernst Kruijff, Harvey Stedman, Vijay M. Pawar, Simon Julier

Attention · Memory · Perception

Can you spot the change?

Blank gap 500 ms

Attention Memory Perception

One scene.
Two states.
One change.

A new spatial test is ready.