Guide
What is a Spatiorama? Gaussian splatting, explained
Last updated: October 12, 2026
A Spatiorama is a spatial experience: a 3D scene you can explore, look around and move through, seeing the space from angles the original photo never showed. Under the hood it’s built with a technique called Gaussian splatting. Here’s what that means, and how it compares with the 3D models and 360° photos you may already know.
Millions of soft points of colour
Most 3D graphics are built from meshes: surfaces made of triangles, with images (textures) wrapped over them. A Gaussian splat scene works differently. It’s a cloud of millions of tiny, semi-transparent blobs, each with a position, a size and stretch, an orientation, an opacity and a colour.
On their own, the blobs (“splats”) are fuzzy. Layered together by the thousand, they blend into a smooth, photographic image from any viewpoint. Each splat’s colour can also shift with the angle you see it from, which is how splats reproduce shine, reflections and soft lighting that are hard to capture with textured triangles.
Where it comes from
The technique was introduced in 2023 in the research paper “3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering” by Kerbl, Kopanas, Leimkühler and Drettakis. It matched the image quality of earlier neural methods while rendering in real time, and it quickly became one of the most widely used ways to turn real places into explorable 3D.
The classic approach rebuilds a place from many overlapping photos. Spatiorama goes further: it generates the scene, so a single photo, a panorama, a short video or even a sentence of text is enough to start from. See how to turn a photo into a 3D spatial experience.
Spatiorama vs a 3D model
- Looks: splats capture the look of a real place, with its lighting, fine detail and soft edges. Meshes tend to look cleaner but more “computer generated” unless they’re made with a lot of care.
- Editing and tools: meshes are the standard for 3D software, game engines and 3D printing. Splats are supported by a fast-growing list of viewers, editors and engines, but not yet everywhere.
- Best of both: Spatiorama can also export a high-quality mesh of your scene when you need one. See SPZ vs PLY.
Spatiorama vs a 360° photo
A 360° photo lets you look in every direction, but only from the one spot where it was taken. Move and nothing changes. A Spatiorama is a space you can move through: step forward, lean around a corner or walk down the street, and the view changes the way it would if you were there. A 360° panorama is a great starting point for a Spatiorama, because it already shows everything around you.
Where you can view it
- In the app, on your phone, including in augmented reality.
- In any browser, through its share link, on a phone or a computer, with no app needed. Try one of our examples.
- In other tools, by exporting it as a splat file (SPZ or PLY) or a mesh.
Try it yourself
Spatiorama is on the App Store for iPhone, and in beta on Android. Make a Spatiorama, then explore and share it from your phone. You can also look around our example Spatioramas in your browser first.
