Show HN: Gaussian Splat of a Strawberry

I built PlayCanvas in 2011 to power video games. Here we are in 2026 and it's powering strawberries.

Wow this is a time killer... ended up here: https://superspl.at/scene/ff1d0393 beautiful!

I’m curious to why not all modern PC/console game developers use this technology to create realistic graphics in their games?

If my old phone can render it with fairly high frame rate, I’m sure a full game with realistic graphics would work well on a mid/high end PC.

I read [1], but I still don't quite know what I'm looking at. My guess is a 3D model reconstructed from lots of detailed pictures?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaussian_splatting

Beautiful.

What I love about gaussian splats is the way they degrade - instead of a hard cutoff or LoD changing spheres into cubes etc., they get increasingly "dreamy" - the basic idea is still there, just less detailed.

Take for example this scene:

https://superspl.at/scene/e721ea7c

If you navigate closer to the trees, things around you become blurry - as if the very fabric of reality unraveled.

4meg: https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/strawberry-dd6a4248076145448...

vs

48meg

Splats make pretty pictures but they are 10x the data for pretty much anything I've seen.

3gig for this one: https://superspl.at/scene/8429e5e2

Also interesting: https://github.com/apple/ml-sharp

Apples model to generate Gaussian splats from a single image. Takes about 30 seconds on an M1 Pro.

It falls apart once you move too much, but for a little side-wiggling or a second-eye view for VR, it's great. And looks a lot better than the old approach of depth map + vertex shaders that I use in https://github.com/combatwombat/tiefling. But ml-sharp has 2.6 GB weights, a bit too big to run in the browser.

As I have learned about Gaussian Splatting just a few weeks ago, I have (perhaps funny/naive/stupid) question: is there any progress or at least theoretical chance to have dynamic lighting?

Just wow!

As I scrolled through the website, I was even more impressed with this one though!

https://superspl.at/scene/c67edb74

If you just see a blurry image and nothing loads or happens, check the javascript console if it says "WebGL not supported"

This is like a beautiful little miniature. It's cool to see gaussian splatting applied to a detailed small thing versus a big scene.

I have a question about perhaps the most boring aspect of this strawberry: the license. you write, "You can download it under CC BY license, but attribution is appreciated rather than required." IANAL, but I'm pretty sure you can't license your work CC-BY and then waive the BY requirement in the description. Rather, you'd have to license it with something more permissive like CC0 and request attribution if you want attribution to be optional. Is that right?

I'm really interested to see what folks can do with animated Gaussian splats: https://youtu.be/X8yRlA7jqEQ?si=dXeHa03jO7MTBNLA

The filesize of a 3d animated splat is seemingly very small, and the method enables ~arbitrary FPS. But it seems the setup required to record it is still huge and expensive, which limits its usefulness.

Even with that there are some interesting use cases, eg. I'd love to be able to watch concerts this way, and freely move around the stage and crowd from any angle.

This took me down a rabbit hole that led to this company, doing Gaussian splat videos: https://www.4dv.ai/. Fascinating.

It definitely looks impressive.

But something looks off: the red area around the "seeds" is pushed towards the center of the strawberry - or that at least the outer most layer is somewhat transparent and some deeper layers are visible.

There is a faint sensation of translucency, I wonder if that's an artefact of the process, or if it's the actual optics of the surface layer if the strawberry...

For those unfamiliar with Gaussian Splatting: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaussian_splatting>.

(I'm ... still not sure what I'm looking at on TFA, and whether or not my browser configuration fails to fully present the site as intended.... OK, if all you're seeing is a blurred image of a strawberry, yes, you'll want to enable a bunch of JS resources. I'm using uMatrix, several hosts must be enabled.)

Noting the permissive license, could we be witnessing the birth of a new Utah teapot or Sponza atrium?

Dany, this is so cool.

I'm wondering if the splat community has decided this paper is valuable -- https://github.com/fraunhoferhhi/Self-Organizing-Gaussians -- looking at all the detail in the strawberry splat made me wonder how small one can get the download, and what the current state of the art is for compression.

My intuition is that in theory focus stacking should not be necessary as preprocessing step for 3dgs (or photogrammetry). Does anyone know if there is any recent developments in this regard?

Focus stacking generally is not perfect process and can lead to artifacts/errors and I'd imagine those can then compound when stacked images are used for 3dgs. Also the image focus actually provides some depth data in itself that could be useful?

Someone: Please combine microscopy with gaussian splatting.

Can you elaborate why you chose slang-splat over let's say Lichtfeld studio? How does it compare to the other splat-training tools?

I know feelings about AI are mixed. But when AI can dream up gaussian splats in real time, from a prompt, and do refinement as you get closer to things... That's going to be pretty bonkers.

Looking at all the outdoor scenes that you can walk around, I wonder how long until we start seeing this in places like Google Maps/Earth, as a replacement for the low-res 3D renderings we have now.

I guess the number of samples required to generate a GS is the constraint now, but maybe that will get solved.

I tried making one, but I couldn't make through the camera position tracking bit, software was super unintuitive. Very interested in gaming applications for this tech, but still waiting for it to be more approachable from a layman's point of view.

Does anyone know if it's already possible to build gaussian splat of the person that moves/rotates from the single camera? (I.e. to use sequence of frames to reconstruct occluded parts of the body for other frames)

Great work! There are more awesome splats on the author's profile page: https://superspl.at/user?id=danylyon

From the link: "Shot from 90 perspectives, 88 focus stacked images each. Nikon Z8, full frame, f/7.1, exposure 1/160, ISO 100, Laowa 180mm macro lens, with LED light and bluescreen." Insane!

You might want to throw that one away :)

What happened to the bottom of that poor strawberry?

How did they decide what the inside of the strawberry looks like? Because that seems very incorrect.

That new Laowa 180mm macro lens is amazing. So sharp, free of chromatic aberrations, compact, and I like the long working distance and reduced perspective distortion that the 180mm focal length offers.

Gaussian splats look really good from a distance, but as soon as you zoom in, they really fall off a cliff :/

I’m impressed by Gaussian Splatting and I love these kind of demos, but I have a noob question - can they respond to lighting?

Can you show the setup?

(Can we do a Gaussian Splat of the setup of the photograph for the Gaussian Splat of the Strawberry?)

I want some math Phds to sit down with the Corridor Crew guys and figure out how to make Gaussian Splat reconstruction way better, the way they came up with CorridorKey.

This doesn't work at all for me (Linux desktop, tried with Firefox and Chrome). I only see "fullscreen-extended blurry thumbnails" of the splats.

Word of warning to mobile users, this website completely crashed my Firefox instance on Android.

How can I start creating Guassian Splat of my environment with my 360 camera? Is it possible to do that with local software?

Very nice. did you segment the images before?

Is it me, or does the backside of that berry not look too good?

Makes me wonder if we'll ever see a video game where the world is created by set designers irl.

Looks like it’s already going bad…

it's weird at the bottom

this is awesome, I wonder what's under there, looks black, maybe thats where they mounted and rotated the strawberry...

Imagine if we start designing GPUs around this technology as opposed to vectors. Imagine what voxel engines would look like. Would love a simulated experience or a small scale that theorizes about this.

Lovely! How was the mechanical setup to ensure that all those shots are consistent, and how long did it take?

Thanks for the reminder how fucked up British government is. Can't run VPN here. (imgur is not available in the UK thanks to those authoritarian twats called Labour)

Impressive, but my poor GPU is melting :)