SplatsThe evolution of media, in brief
RSS

Niantic crowns the first #SplatYourWorld champions

Illustration of a first-place trophy built from gaussian splats, with confetti

Illustration: Splats Newsroom · Culture

Nico Ferrand

Nico Ferrand

Aug 12, 2026-Culture

Niantic Spatial announced the winners of its first #SplatYourWorld challenge, which asked people around the world to capture real places as gaussian splats with Scaniverse.

The big picture: A vendor-run competition with winners spanning Bolivia to Transylvania is a sign gaussian splatting has matured into a creative community and hobbyist culture — not just a research technique.

Zoom in:

  • Hiroto Otsubo won the grand prize with a capture of the Salar de Uyuni salt flats in Bolivia, made with an Insta360 X5.
  • Gabriele Romagnoli took two categories: a drone-captured Sleutel Heat Centre in Leiden (Best Industrial Environment) and the CORPUS Museum in South Holland (Best Urban Infrastructure).
  • Razvan Onisca's capture of Detunata Goala in Transylvania won Best Natural Landscape.
  • Submissions ran July 1–31 as .SPZ files with video walkthroughs, judged on reconstruction quality, scale and coverage, and real-world impact.

What's next: Niantic is offering 105,000 free Scaniverse processing credits as a promotion through August 31 — a fairly direct invitation to go splat something.

Go deeper:

  • Radiance Fields: Scaniverse #SplatYourWorld challenge winners announced
⟵ Back to the brief

More stories

The SuperSplat 3.3.0 editor with a Gaussian splat capture of a street cafe loaded — furled yellow umbrellas over metal tables, parked cars and a tree-lined street behind. The scene manager and transform panels sit at the left, the tool strip along the bottom, and the status bar reads two million splats

SuperSplat rewrote itself on WebGPU and deleted the fallback

Today

Two rows of photoacoustic reconstructions of a branching vascular phantom, shown for SlingBAG, for PAGS, and as the ground-truth digital phantom. The SlingBAG panels carry a mottled noise floor around the vessels; the PAGS panels are cleaner, with the vessel network closer to the crisp white tracery of the phantom

Splatting, but the light is sound and the camera is a transducer

Sep 1, 2026

A schematic of a scene divided into a wireframe grid of cells against black. One cell is outlined in yellow and holds a sharp green cylinder; a blurred blue slab sits behind it and a red slab in front, standing in for the frozen regions flattened into single background and foreground images

Their trick makes VRAM independent of scene size. The test scenes were too small to show it.

Aug 31, 2026

A fairground drop-tower ride rendered twice: on the left from a degraded reconstruction, where the tower and foliage dissolve into white streaks and smears, and on the right after refinement, sharp and photographic against a clear sky

Give it scattered keypoints and it matches a full splat reconstruction

Aug 29, 2026

splats

Short daily briefs on the evolution of media — gaussian splats, volumetric video, dome theaters, headsets, and the research underneath.

Newsroom

  • Latest
  • All stories
  • RSS feed
© 2026 Splats · Terms · Privacy