John Apple

What if maps didn't just show you where a place is, but let you step inside it? 3D Gaussian splatting makes that possible. The technique emerged in 2023. Capture a street, a room, or a museum with a phone, and you can turn those images into a photorealistic 3D scene that people can explore in a browser. Tools like SuperSplat from PlayCanvas make the editing, publishing, and sharing surprisingly simple. The core tools are open source and run in the browser. Of course, creating and serving these scenes at scale still takes significant compute. We're moving toward a world where streets, buildings, landmarks, and other physical spaces can be captured and explored digitally.