Scannerian

2D to 3D

Right Here, Right Now!
An HDR 360 image of Glastonbury Abbey and the navigable scene here. Use WASD keys to navigate link.

The technologies that take a flat image and make it pop in 3D are now with us. This year I’ve spent a few months using a max plan on Marble Plus by The World Labs which has turned a lot of my 360 spherical photos into navigable 3D Gaussian Splat (3DGS) spaces (or as they like to call them worlds).

Marble requires prompts as well as the images (in some cases you can upload videos too). Occasionally I will ask for an environment like frost or cyberpunk and the results have been the best eye candy I could ask for from the source images.

I am also able to join a few of these worlds together using the same platform, but I prefer to use a free software called SuperSplatEditor by PlayCanvas. I’ve grown used to this editor for 3DGS over the last few years and it works in a browser (as long as you’re computer has graphics capabilities enough to run it).

I make this example because the level of detail and the actual time to construct would have taken weeks – if not months – in the past and a small team of experts to code and build and here is me with a few old Google street view images I made ten years ago and a whole new way of enjoying them in VR, AR and XR.

It Keeps Getting Better

What was even better than Marble arrived while I was world building in August. It not only blew my mind but gave me (and I know many others) an excitement that I’ve not had for a technology since 2022 when radiance fields allowed me to scan glass and other reflective surfaces (Gaussian splats improved that even further in 2023). This new model from the world labs is called Atlas and is an absolute game changer to how 3D from 2D is reconstructed.

Above is one of my first creations on Atlas was made with a still from a drone.

Already, I can imagine so many use cases for this ability and a lot less images or video to be captured in order to recreate the beautiful spaces that I’ve been cloning in 3D all these years.

Some of my past deliverables were for virtual production sets, but they decided to use generative AI to create a lot of the historic buildings that required costly licensing and insurances. This is yet another industry that will benefit from Atlas’s photorealism and speed.

It’s a good time to be a creator in this realm.