RealityScan

RealityScan is the photogrammetry and Structure from Motion application built by Capturing Reality and published by Epic Games, which acquired the Bratislava studio in 2021. The desktop application shipped for more than a decade as RealityCapture and was renamed at version 2.0, when Epic brought it under the same name as the RealityScan mobile capture app. Both products now sit at realityscan.com, and the desktop build installs through the Epic Games Launcher from the RealityScan tab inside the Unreal Engine section.

Structure from Motion is the first stage of nearly every gaussian splatting pipeline, resolving where each photograph was taken and producing the sparse point cloud that training initializes from. RealityScan is used at that stage rather than as a trainer. It reads images and laser scan data, aligns them, and exports the result in COLMAP format for tools such as Postshot and Nerfstudio. Radiance field and COLMAP export arrived in the 1.5 release and has been extended in every 2.x version since. The application also produces meshes, orthophotos and georeferenced output for conventional photogrammetry work.

Hardware support widened substantially in 2026. RealityScan 2.2 added full AMD GPU support, which Epic described as one of the most requested features in the application's history, covering RDNA 4 gaming cards through RDNA 3 PRO workstation GPUs. Every processing stage is accelerated on Radeon and Radeon PRO at the same speed as the CUDA path, and AMD and NVIDIA cards can be mixed in one machine with the workload split across both in parallel. AMD support is Windows only.

The same release brought 360 camera input. Epic's PanoToViews web application converts equirectangular stills into cube face views and writes XMP sidecars carrying the calibration metadata RealityScan needs. Because equirectangular images are undistorted by nature and focal length can be calculated, RealityScan skips lens correction during alignment. The tool defaults to 90 degrees of field of view per cube face and can be widened to 120 degrees, which introduces overlap between faces and gives sparse views more to align against. A single 360 shot covers an entire scene, which changes the capture arithmetic for interiors.

Earlier in the 2.x line, version 2.1 arrived in November 2025 and 2.1.1 followed with COLMAP updates in March 2026. Third party tooling has grown around the alignment stage as well, with 360 Splat Pro adding RealityScan meshing and GPU controls in v1.2.

Licensing has been unusual for professional photogrammetry since Epic changed it in April 2024. RealityScan is free for students, educators, and individuals and companies with less than $1 million USD in gross revenue over the past 12 months, with no feature restriction on the free tier. Above that threshold a seat costs $1,250 per year, purchased and managed through the Epic Developer Portal, with a 30 day trial available and custom terms offered above 25 seats.