My first apartment hunt was in a city I'd never been to. I spent hours zooming in on twelve professional photos of a room I couldn't stand inside. The photographer had chosen the frame. The frame had chosen what I'd see. Everything outside it was a guess.
The gallery is a set of twenty decisions the buyer didn't make. The walkthrough video is a path the agent chose for them. Neither of these is the thing you actually want when you're about to spend six figures on a room you've never entered. What you want is to walk it. Any hour. From any city. As many times as you need to decide.
The technology to do this existed in labs for a decade. It cost $3,400 in special camera hardware and shipped in two weeks. It locked your file on someone else's server. It got trotted out for the top 1% of listings and skipped for everything else. The math never worked for the agent selling a $700K walk-up on the east side.
In 2023 a paper out of Inria and the Max Planck Institute described Gaussian splatting, a reconstruction technique that trades a mesh-based scene for a cloud of anisotropic Gaussians. Ordinary phone video became a viable input almost overnight. What used to require an $80,000 rig now required an iPhone and a slow walk. And we'd finally reached the point where the phone in your pocket is enough hardware for the job.
VOLUME is the wager on that.
The wager is that when the cost of a walkable tour drops from $500 to $79, agents stop reserving them for the top of their book and start shipping one on every listing. That when a buyer can walk the primary bedroom three times at midnight from another timezone, they arrive at the physical showing already sold on the layout. That when the tour outlives the listing, agents keep their entire portfolio as a walkable archive.
We built it in the open. Every tour is downloadable — your file, forever, no matter what happens to us. We do not lock the format. We do not lock the render. We publish exactly what you shot.
If you're an agent, an STR host, a property manager, or a designer who ships work you want people to walk before they book — that's who we built this for. You do the shot. We do the geometry. Your buyers do the rest.
— Roan