TechByte – New technology creates photorealistic graphics at home

There’s a technology that’s seen a huge amount of development over the past couple of months, and you can try it out for yourself at home.
Gaussian splatting is a technique that takes hundreds or thousands of photos (or frames of video), creates a three-dimensional point cloud, and then spits out a 3D model or environment that can be displayed right in your web browser.
I put together a quick and dirty scan of the studio here at WDEF News 12 that you can explore for yourself. I made by walking through the studio with my phone while taking video. Then I uploaded that video to a service called Vid2Scene. It created a 3D Gaussian splat by analyzing each frame, using content-aware AI to create a 3D point-cloud out of the geometry within, and then outputting a small file that represents those millions of points.
I uploaded that file to a free and open source service called Supersplat. You can follow that link and view it for yourself. There are thousands of other (higher quality) examples of 3d gaussian splatting on that website, and they’re all free to explore.
Creating these splats requires a pretty beefy machine to render, so cloud services are the best option unless you have a powerful graphics card and don’t mind spending a few extra bucks on your power bill.
This tech is still in its early stages when it comes to consumer usage, but I can see it being extremely useful for real estate, crime scene preservation, VR games, and countless other applications.