Niantic Spatial has launched object interaction, a beta feature that makes individual objects in a captured environment selectable and movable in simulation.
A gaussian splatting capture preserves the visual detail of a real place, but the scene it produces is static. Object interaction separates whole, movable objects from their surroundings, keeping each object's appearance and attaching collision information and simplified, estimated physical properties. Those properties are a baseline for how objects interact and are not meant to replace detailed physics simulation.
The workflow runs in four steps. Environment understanding first identifies candidate objects suitable for separation. Each selected object is then extracted from the surrounding area, reviewed and cleaned up where needed, and finally represented individually so it can be selected, moved or removed to produce a different layout.
Niantic Spatial built the feature for robotics teams whose robots work in places that change after capture, where a chair moves, equipment shifts or clutter is rearranged. A policy trained in one static arrangement can come to depend on details that may not hold in the real world. With object interaction, a team can generate varied layouts of the same recognizable environment, test navigation, obstacle avoidance and object handling across them, and assess the results in its existing simulation and validation workflows.
Object interaction joins relighting, which Niantic Spatial introduced in September. Relighting recomputes only the per Gaussian spherical harmonics against the aligned mesh, so collision and navigation meshes carry over between variants. Used together, the two features vary both layout and lighting in one captured environment without rebuilding it.
Access has widened since then. Relighting launched as a beta for selected design partners and Niantic Spatial described it as "not a self-service API". Customers on the Deploy and Enterprise tiers of the Embodied AI plans can now pilot scene variation features, including relighting, and those plans also carry the Places Library of 100 simulation ready environments for Isaac Sim, Isaac Lab and other OpenUSD simulators.
Deploy and Enterprise customers can pilot the beta on up to 10 scenes.
