Gracia is now available on Quest’s App Lab.
What Is Gracia?
Simple stereoscopic 3D photos and videos like Apple’s spatial video only offer limited parallax of a view of a scene presented in a rectangle in front of you, and immersive 180° or 360° content like Apple Immersive Video does the same in a hemisphere or sphere.
But the holy grail of real-world immersive content is truly volumetric capture which you can actually move your head or even walk through – essentially photorealistic VR, captured from the real world instead of created by 3D artists in modeling software. Gracia delivers that today for stills, and claims it will for short videos too later this year.
Gracia is possible thanks to Gaussian splatting, a relatively new technique for rendering 3D volumes by representing the scene as a collection of overlapping 3D Gaussian functions. The company claims their specific Gaussian splatting rendering implementation is faster than “any other technology on the market”, which is how it can run on Quest 3 standalone without a PC – albeit at a noticeably lower resolution.
David Heaney
The platform has been available on Steam for PC VR since June, and could be sideloaded on Quest 3 via SideQuest, but is now available on Meta’s official platform via App Lab.
The App Lab release version comes with a 50% resolution boost compared to the earlier sideloadable version, though the viewing clarity is still noticeably worse than on PC VR.
In the Quest 3 version of Gracia six volumetric still captures are available to view:
- Embyro Of The Future: a human art installation depicting where “nature merges with the digital realm”.
- Cyclical Existence: an outdoor scene featuring “an arrangement of dried flora in a vase on a wooden table”.
- Food Collection: a collection of three dishes from New York and California, single-object captures without a background.
- Construct of Play: an indoor scene with a lego excavator on a table.
- Reclamation: “an aged tree stump covered in ivy against a tranquil forest”.
- Transience In Bloom: an indoor scene with a cherry blossom tree sitting on a table.
Note that while the app lets you launch it with hand tracking, you’ll need to pick up your controllers to download and launch the scenes.
Photorealistic capture of this kind is impressive to experience in VR, even without motion, and a glimpse – albeit a blurry one – of an eventual future where memories can eventually be relived exactly as if you were there again.
