Simple stereoscopic 3D photos and videos such as Apple's Spatial Video offer only limited parallax of a view of a scene presented in a rectangle in front of you, and immersive 180° or 360° content such as Apple Immersive Video does the same in a hemisphere or sphere.
But the holy grail of real-world immersive content is true volumetric capture that you can actually move your head through or even walk through — essentially photorealistic VR, captured from the real world rather than created by 3D artists in modeling software. Gracia is delivering that today for stills, and says it’s coming to short videos later this year.
Gracia is made possible by Gaussian splatting, a relatively new technique for rendering 3D volumes by representing the scene as a collection of overlapping 3D Gaussian functionsThe company claims that its specific Gaussian splatting rendering implementation is faster than “any other technology on the market”, and that it can therefore run on Quest 3 standalone without a PC – albeit at a noticeably lower resolution.