This is what Gracia delivers, in an early form. Gaussian Splatting is a new rendering technique that renders 3D volume by combining overlapping 3D
. This makes Gracia possible. The company claims their specific Gaussian splatting rendering implementation is faster than “any other technology on the market”, which is how its stills can run on Quest 3 standalone without a PC – albeit at a noticeably lower resolution.
The volumetric clips are called Spinning Dancer (29 seconds), Family Moment (19 seconds), and Shadow Boxing (8 seconds). These volumetric clips can be manipulated with the thumbstick, but they are not going to allow you to stream live events using this tech anytime soon. That equates to weeks of total AWS compute time per minute, and though it can be parallelized to take less time in reality, it’s still a significant cost.Apple’s spatial videoFurther, the download size of these clips equates to over 300 megabytes per second. This means that streaming such content theoretically requires a 2.4 Gigabit connection. However, this is a technology few people have. Gracia’s compression is expected to increase by an order-of-magnitude within a calendar year. This will make it feasible on fast modern internet connections. It’s also exploring using cloud VR streaming.Apple Immersive VideoEven with the current download solution, there’s a multi-minute decompression time. Gracia says this is mostly to save AWS storage bandwidth, and they’re currently “rethinking” this approach.
Spinning Dancer
Still, those minutes were absolutely worth the wait. Gracia offers a glimpse into the future with its moving volumetric clips. If you own a PC, you can try them out right away. The startup has announced that Gracia’s stills will be available on Quest 3S and 3S. It also plans to add moving scenes in the future.