Re:Show HN: Immersive Gaussian Splat Tour of Grace Cathedral...
by ovenchips on Tuesday July 21, 2026 @04:52AM
(#48989754)
One other little easter egg you may not have noticed. There's an American flag gently fluttering in the breeze on top of a nearby building. We were discussing whether to adds some birds as well, but that never made the final cut. You ask about factoring lighting away from the scene - actually, PlayCanvas can already do relighting and shadow-casting for gaussian splat-based scenes:
https://playcanvas.com/examples/#/gaussian-splatting/relight...
Some kind of day/night toggle would have been another great feature...but again, it didn't make the final cut of the experience. Maybe a HD Remix is needed. :o)
It's like seeing the promise of Google Street View realized.
The technology is in such an early stage and it already slaps this hard.
Wonder what the next steps are for this tech? "Un-splatting" optimizations to convert things like flat surfaces into classic rigid textured geometry? Factoring the lighting away from the geometry? Filling the pipeline with AI tooling - segmentation to remove the "variables" like humans automatically, generative AI to fill in the missing non-semantic details based on the surroundings, more generative AI to "port" the data from things like public high resolution images of plaques or other undercaptured details into the scene?
Seeing this kind of reconstruction now makes me very excited for what the 3D environments of the future are going to be like.