Cake Splatter

A gaussian splat is a 3D scene built from millions of tiny, soft, translucent blobs of color — gaussians — floating in space. Each one knows where it is, how big it is, which way it's stretched, and how its color shifts as you move around it. Alone, a blob is nothing. Together, a few hundred thousand of them become a photograph you can walk through.

How one gets made

1. Capture — orbit an object or room with a phone camera. Lots of overlap, steady hands, everything holds still.
2. Solve — software compares the photos to work out exactly where the camera was for each shot, purely from the images.
3. Train — a GPU spends a few minutes nudging millions of blobs — moving, stretching, recoloring — until, from every known camera angle, they reproduce the original photos.

What's left over is the scene. Point a virtual camera anywhere and the blobs blend into a view no photo ever captured.

Why not just a 3D model?

Classic 3D models are hard shells with pictures glued on — they struggle with fur, glass, reflections and soft edges. Splats don't have surfaces at all, so they keep the messy, real-light look of photography: the shimmer, the blur, the depth.

The demo scenes here were shot on an iPhone and trained on a Mac's GPU in minutes, with the Cake Splatter pipeline. The wisps at the edges are the reconstruction being honest about what the camera never saw.