Explainer
What Gaussian splatting actually is, in plain English.
You've probably seen a splat tour without knowing it. Zillow, CoStar and most US listing portals shipped support for the format in 2025. The UK is a year behind. Here's what the format does, why it looks so much better than what came before, and where it earns its keep against the alternatives.
Captured as a splat
Walk through
The short version
A Gaussian splat is a 3D representation of a real space made up of millions of soft, oriented, coloured "blobs" — Gaussians, in the maths — that together render as a photorealistic scene. The viewer projects all of those blobs to the screen at 60 frames a second, letting a buyer walk freely through the captured space in any direction.
That's all of it. No mesh, no texture maps, no polygon counts, no app to install. Just a smarter way of representing what the camera saw.
How it works
From shutter click to walkable space.
The capture and processing pipeline is simpler than people expect, even if the maths underneath isn't.
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01
Capture
A two-person crew shoots overlapping photos and short video sequences from many positions, covering every part of the space the buyer will walk.
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02
Camera solve
The software figures out exactly where each photo was taken from. This is a known step from photogrammetry and takes about an hour for a residential capture.
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03
Splat training
Millions of Gaussians are spawned in the scene volume. Their position, colour and shape are iteratively adjusted until the rendered scene matches the photos as closely as possible. This runs overnight.
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04
Polish
The polish pass cleans up artefacts, masks out personal items and balances exposure across rooms shot in different lighting conditions.
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05
Viewer assembly
The trained splat is embedded in a branded viewer with navigation controls, room thumbnails and a contact CTA. Delivered as an iframe URL ready to embed anywhere.
What it's good at
Where splats outperform every other format.
Photoreal interactive walkthroughs that actually feel like being in the room. Reflections, light spill from windows, the texture of polished stone, the soft edges of curtains — all preserved properly, in a format the buyer can walk around in.
Mobile playback at full quality. Where Matterport's heavier mesh models stutter on older phones, splats stream progressively and run smoothly on a 2022 iPhone.
Capture of unusual surfaces. Glass, gloss, foliage, water, intricate plasterwork — the things that gave photogrammetry trouble — handle cleanly in splat capture.
What it's not for
The honest list of trade-offs.
Floor plans. A splat doesn't have a defined surface in the way a mesh model does, so deriving a RICS-grade floor plan needs an extra step. We can re-render a vector floor plan from the splat geometry, but it's a separate £75 add-on.
CAD-grade dimensions. If your use case is mortgage valuation, RICS reporting or technical measurement, a photogrammetry capture (Matterport) gives you cleaner numbers.
Live capture. A splat needs a few hours of overnight processing. If you need a 3D walkthrough live within the hour, this is not the right format.
Common questions
Quick answers.
- How does Gaussian splatting differ from photogrammetry?
- Photogrammetry produces a polygon mesh draped in photo textures. A splat captures the actual light and depth of a scene as a cloud of soft 3D particles. The result is photoreal where photogrammetry tends to look like a video game.
- Is it the same as NeRF?
- Related but different. NeRF is a neural-network-based scene representation that was slow to render. Gaussian splatting uses an explicit point representation that runs at 60 fps in any browser. Splatting effectively superseded NeRF for commercial use.
- Do buyers need an app to view a splat tour?
- No. The viewer runs in any modern browser on any device released in the last four years. No app, no install, no compatibility problems.
- How big are the files and will they slow my listing page down?
- A typical residential splat is 200MB to 1.5GB total. The viewer streams progressively, so the first frame appears within seconds and detail loads as the user moves around. The page itself stays fast.
Want to see what your stock looks like as a splat?
Send us one address. We'll capture, process and hand back the result inside a week.