Peter Flaherty's Empire At Sea stages a 22 minute drama with 4D gaussian splatting characters for ten Apple Vision Pro viewers at a time. The solarpunk story follows climate scientists stranded on an offshore oil rig after a disaster wipes out the mainland.
The piece was produced by Flaherty Pictures, 4DV.ai, and NightLight Labs, premiered in competition at Venice Immersive in September, and won the Venice Immersive Achievement Prize at the 83rd Venice International Film Festival.
The cast, including Orlando Jones, Ayelet Zurer, Geoffrey Arend, and Beth Grant, was captured on a stage of 100 8K cameras, with initial volumetric development by Infinite Realities. 4DV.ai completed the volumetric reconstruction and the 4DGS training.
Empire At Sea combines the 4DGS characters with mesh and texture scenery programmed in Unity. The characters appear to rise out of a custom LED table 14 feet long and 9 feet wide, with 8,400 individually mapped LEDs. A 16 by 8 foot LED ring hangs overhead, and lighting beneath the table accents what the production calls its "vertical gaussian splat transitions."
Viewers wear M5 Apple Vision Pro headsets and move freely around the table, following branching storylines, while each headset's tracked position shapes its own picture and sound. The runtime lets a venue run two groups per hour.
4DV.ai previously partnered with Dell Technologies, NVIDIA, and radiancefields.com on an 11.5 minute video made entirely in 4DGS, which premiered at SIGGRAPH 2026. The Empire At Sea team has not published file sizes, frame rates, or how the 4DGS sequences are stored and played back on the headset.
Lincoln Center and ASU Gammage commissioned the piece, which plays Tempe Center for the Arts in March 2027. Empire At Sea comes to Lincoln Center in January 2027.
