I turned my local beauty spot into an immersive 3D environment using Splatica and my Insta360 cameras — and the whole process is surprisingly easy

Your 360 camera — or 360 drone — has a new hidden talent: the ability to build eerily accurate 3D models of real places and objects, with almost zero effort from you.

It's all down to a process known as 3D Gaussian Splatting, made more accessible than ever by a cloud platform called Splatica. And I've tried it, using both my Antigravity A1 360 drone and Insta360 X5 360 camera to recreate rooms in my house and landmarks in my hometown. Here's how it works, how easy it is to use, how much it costs – and what I think of it.

How 3D Gaussian Splatting works

At its core, 3D Gaussian Splatting is a method for reconstructing a real-world environment as a fully navigable 3D scene, using nothing more than video footage as its raw material. When you feed footage into the system, it ...