What a Gaussian splat actually is (in plain English)

There are two ways to explain Gaussian splatting: the honest one, and the linear-algebra one. This is the honest one.

Start with a photograph

A photograph is a flat grid of tiny colored squares. Every pixel is a color and a position on a 2D canvas. It's fixed. If you want to see the corner behind the couch, you have to move the camera and take a new photograph.

A Gaussian splat is what happens when you take that same idea — colored dots on a canvas — but move the whole thing into 3D space. Instead of tiny squares, you have tiny fuzzy blobs. Each blob has a position in the world (x, y, z), a color, a size, and a direction it's soft on. Stack a few million of them together and you get something that looks — from any angle a camera could stand in — remarkably like the space you photographed.

Where the blobs come from

You film a walkthrough. The reconstruction pipeline pulls apart each frame, figures out where the camera was standing at that moment, and computes: what set of 3D blobs, if I rendered them from this camera position, would produce this frame?

Do that for enough frames and the blobs converge on a shape that's consistent with every angle you shot. That shape is the space — as a data structure. Not a mesh, not a point cloud, not a NeRF. Millions of tiny, colored, oriented blobs.

Why this specifically, and not the older techniques

Photogrammetry has been around for decades. NeRFs were the hot thing three years ago. Splats matter because they render fast enough on consumer GPUs — and browsers — to feel like a native 3D game rather than a slow, streamy point cloud you have to wait for.

A 14 MB splat file will render at 60 fps on a five-year-old phone. A NeRF of the same room needs a server-side inference step and streams over the wire. A traditional mesh has to be hand-cleaned or the geometry falls apart at the corners.

Why this matters if you're selling a house

The bar for “3D tour” used to be a hardware purchase, a courier appointment, and a proprietary viewer. The splat pipeline compresses all of that into a phone walk + a URL. Buyers get an experience that feels like the room. Sellers keep the file forever. And the whole thing is small enough to embed anywhere a link works.

That's the whole product, honestly. VOLUME is the plumbing that turns your phone into the camera + the tools that turn the output into something you can hand to a buyer without asking them to install anything.