How light becomes a record

Capture

An object is circled, from the air and from the ground, in light that stays as constant as possible. An overcast sky beats sunshine: hard shadows burn themselves into the footage and can't be separated out afterwards.

Computation

The position of every camera is worked out from the footage first. A cloud of Gaussian distributions is then optimised against that footage until its projection matches what the cameras recorded. Each of these points carries a position, extent, rotation, opacity, and a direction-dependent colour.

What this means

A Gaussian splat is not a mesh of triangles. There is no surface to touch, no volume to measure. What exists instead is a very precise record of how a place looked on a particular day — reflections, haze, and foliage included.

Limits

What wasn't photographed doesn't exist. Interiors are missing where they weren't accessible. Glass and water become artefacts. And a splat doesn't age with the place: it shows the capture date printed on every object's data sheet — for some objects, an active site especially, the real state can already look measurably different weeks later.

Publication

The finished scenes live on superspl.at and are embedded into this site from there. The viewer only loads once it's requested — a single splat easily runs past a hundred megabytes.