Gracia’s moving volumetric scenes, dynamic gaussian splats, are now available on Quest 3 and Pico 4 headsets standalone.
Simple stereoscopic 3D photos and videos like Apple’s spatial video only offer limited parallax of a view of a scene presented in a rectangle in front of you, and immersive 180deg or 360deg content like Apple Immersive Video does the same in a hemisphere or sphere.
But the holy grail of captured immersive content is truly volumetric scenes that you can actually move your head or even walk through – essentially photorealistic VR, captured from the real world instead of created by 3D artists in modeling software. Gaussian Splatting is a new method of rendering 3D volume by combining overlapping 3D
. This makes Gracia possible. The volumetric clips were first released in the PC version of Gracia a month ago. They are now also available on Pico 4 or Pico 4 ultra, the Meta Horizon Store, for Quest 3 headsets and Quest 3S, as well the Pico Store, for Pico 4 and Pico 4S. You can move around them with a thumbstick or just walk around your room with your body – they’re truly volumetric scenes.Gaussian functionsUnlike on PC VR, you can also view these scenes in your real room via passthrough, arguably the best way to experience them. This technology is not yet ready to be used to volumetrically stream live events or capture them. 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.
Further, 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. It’s also exploring cloud VR streaming. It’s also exploring using cloud VR streaming.
Still, Gracia’s moving volumetric clips are a tantalizing glimpse of the future of media and entertainment, and if you have a compatible headset, you should go and try it right now.