PhotoSplat3D

PhotoSplat3D is a single image Gaussian Splatting application from Hangzhou Ninglin Cultural Innovation Co., Ltd. It ships in two forms, an Apple Vision Pro app on the App Store and a Mac app for Apple Silicon, and its source sits on GitHub as a desktop friendly fork of Apple's ml-sharp project. The underlying method is SHARP, published as Sharp Monocular View Synthesis in Less Than a Second. The App Store version is 2.4 and the app is free at 2.7 GB.

Reconstruction runs locally in every configuration. On Vision Pro a photo becomes an explorable model in seconds with no upload and no network requirement, and the developer declares that the app collects no data. On the Mac the same conversion runs in one click and adds batch processing over folders of images. The command line accepts a device flag of cpu, mps or cuda, so the model runs on Apple Silicon through Metal Performance Shaders or on an NVIDIA card, though the separate trajectory video renderer is CUDA only. The model checkpoint is roughly 300 MB and downloads on first inference.

Panoramas are handled as a first class input rather than as a special case. The predict command detects 180 degree and 360 degree equirectangular images automatically and reprojects them before reconstruction, with a choice of five strategies named cube6, ring8, ring12, front4 and front6 that trade the number of synthesised views against face resolution. That path is what lets a single 360 frame from a consumer camera become a splat without a multi image dataset behind it.

A separate import route brings in captures the app did not train. PhotoSplat3D reads public Insta360 Spatial Capture share links pasted into the app, downloading a compact spatial model of roughly 10 to 20 MB by default or the original PLY at 100 to 250 MB, which puts an Insta360 X6 Spatial Capture scene into an immersive Vision Pro viewer. The developer states plainly that this parses preview assets from public share pages, that it is not an official Insta360 API, and that PhotoSplat3D is not affiliated with Insta360, so the path depends on Insta360 leaving those pages as they are.

Beyond generation the Vision Pro app behaves as a viewer and a light editor. It imports PLY, Splat, SPZ and SOG, and rendering is credited to two open source projects, SuperSplat and MetalSplatter, the Metal renderer that reached 1.0 in February 2026. Spatial brush editing paints and erases directly on a model in space with 48 colour presets across six palettes and support for the Logitech MX Ink stylus. An orbit mode, gesture controls for move, rotate and scale, exposure adjustment, half and full immersion toggles and an in app community feed for sharing and remixing models round out the app. Text to image generation sits in front of the pipeline, so a prompt can become an image and then a splat without a camera at any stage.

Licensing is layered because the lineage is. The fork's own contributions are MIT, Apple derived code stays under Apple's upstream license with its copyright headers preserved on redistribution, and the model weights carry a third license of their own. Anyone redistributing a build needs to read all three rather than assuming the MIT notice covers the whole repository.