Spatial Fields 1.3: 3DGUT USDZ Import, Better LCC Performance, and Expanded AR
Michael Rubloff
When we first covered Spatial Fields V1.1 last October, Contrast Media Labs had already positioned their Apple native Gaussian Splat viewer as one of the more technically serious options in the space, bringing with it full spherical harmonics, clean PLY and SPZ support, and a working AR mode. Since then the app has moved quickly.
V1.2.0 arrived in late January and rewrote much of the rendering stack. GPU side frustum culling, a fully GPU render path that eliminated the unsorted splat flicker that plagued CPU sorting pipelines, shader based dynamic LOD, on demand rendering across all Apple platforms, XGRIDS LCC streaming with per-tile quality levels, and full Apple TV mirroring. V1.3.0, released this week, builds on it with three focused additions.
The first of which has added 3DGUT USDZ import. We have covered NVIDIA’s 3D Gaussian Unscented Transform extensively; the CVPR 2025 paper that replaces EWA splatting with the Unscented Transform, enabling distorted cameras, rolling shutter correction, and hybrid rasterization plus ray tracing for secondary effects like reflections and refractions.
You can now load exported USDZ files directly on iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Vision Pro, and Apple TV. The practical reach of 3DGUT, until now largely confined to desktop workstations and Omniverse, extends to every Apple device in the lineup.
The second change refines dynamic LOD performance for LCC imports. XGRIDS’ LCC format, which Spatial Fields adopted in V1.2, delivers multi resolution streaming that lets constrained devices like iPhone and Vision Pro load high quality tiles at the focus of attention and lower quality tiles elsewhere. LCC performance on compute limited hardware has been a balancing act, and V1.3’s LOD improvements continue the tuning work that started with V1.2.1’s meta.lcc file fix.
Third, V1.3 expands support for larger captures in AR mode.
Spatial Fields is available on the App Store for iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Vision Pro, and Apple TV.
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