A splat is a
Take a few million of those puffs, drop them at the exact points in space where a real room reflected light back at your camera, and — from any angle you look — you see the room. That's a Gaussian splat. That's what VOLUME ships.
For twenty years the answer to "show me a room in 3D" meant one of two things: a triangle mesh with photographic textures glued to it (Matterport, Sketchfab, most game engines) or a stitched panorama that looked 3D from one fixed point (Google Street View, 360 tours).
Meshes are hard on interiors. A window, a curtain, a chandelier — each is a nightmare of transparency, reflection, and thin geometry that a mesh doesn't model well. Panoramas fake it from one spot; step three feet forward and the illusion collapses.
Gaussian splatting is the third answer. Instead of building surfaces or stitching flat photos, it fills the room with millions of tiny colored blobs — each one an ellipsoid that knows how bright, how transparent, and how stretched it should be, from every angle. Render enough of them at the right spots and the room appears. Move the camera and the blobs re-render for the new angle instantly.
Not a scan of the room. A cloud of light that behaves like the room.
A 14 MB splat renders on the phone in someone's pocket.
Traditional 3D tours needed a plugin, a desktop, a beefy GPU. A splat is just a list of positions and colors. The WebGL renderer that draws it (Spark on our stack) is small, ships as a script tag, and paints the first frame in under three seconds on a five-year-old iPhone.
This is the interesting one for VOLUME's market. Every buyer clicking your listing on Instagram is on a phone. A tour that requires a plugin is a tour they won't open. A splat opens.
- 01
You film a walk.
Two minutes on your phone, landscape, 1080p. Every angle you cover is an angle the splat will render from later.
- 02
Frames get extracted.
About 200 sharp frames per minute of video, evenly spaced across time and camera position.
- 03
The camera track solves.
Structure-from-motion figures out where your phone was in space at each frame — the invisible skeleton every splat needs.
- 04
The splat trains.
Millions of small ellipsoids get placed and re-placed until they collectively match every frame you shot. This is the ~20 minutes of MakeSplat work.
- 05
It publishes.
The finished .ply lands on our storage, gets a public URL, and starts rendering to buyers within milliseconds of the first request.
Ship a splat of your next listing.
$79 one-off, or free on your first tour. If it can't reconstruct from your walk, you're never charged.