There’s a new app on Vision Pro that finally makes good on the promise of viewing Gaussian Splats in full fidelity, and it’s called Spatial Fields from Contrast Reality. You might remember their work bringing lifelike Christmas cards last December using Gaussian Splatting, but their work has been significantly stepped up here.
This VR implementation comes with full spherical harmonic support, meaning you’re getting those lifelike view dependent effects right in your headset. While generic compressed splats are not supported in Spatial Fields, Niantic’s .spz format is, which makes it easier to feed larger scenes.
Most of what’s out there today either runs in the browser or tries to repurpose Unity projects that weren’t really meant for mixed reality. WebXR options don’t support passthrough on AVP due to OS restrictions, and a lot of current offerings don’t support spherical harmonics. Contrast Reality developed a custom plugin to bridge SwiftUI and Unity. This isn’t supported out of the box in fully immersive visionOS apps in Unity, so they rebuilt the Unity pipeline to allow native windowing and control overlays on top of full 3D content.
Spatial Fields lets you drop your .ply or .spz files into iCloud Drive, and from there, you’re seconds away from seeing your captures living and breathing in your space.
Performance-wise, 300,000 splats is the recommended ballpark for smooth navigation. The app can handle more, but at a cost. When you push beyond that threshold, the Apple Vision Pro introduces a subtle but disorienting “wobble” effect. Spatial Fields adapts how frequently it sorts splats to optimize for this, but the artifacts may still show up in especially large scenes.
Radiance Field representations let you freely explore an entire moment in time with lifelike fidelity and Spatial Fields help bring us faster to this future. If you have a Vision Pro running visionOS 2.0, Spatial Fields is now available through Testflight.
