Visual artist Toshihiro "Tommy" Oshima and Kaukokaipuu Kobo, the studio he founded in 2020 with two colleagues, have been converting most of Dr. Kenji Kohiyama's two decades of macro insect photogrammetry into 3D Gaussian splats. Splats, known for their ability to represent fine detail, are surfacing the body hairs, translucent wings, and iridescent cuticle that Kohiyama's earlier mesh photogrammetry tended to smooth over or drop. The work is part of the traveling exhibition "Insects: An Exhibition by Takeshi Yoro and Kenji Kohiyama, Look, Feel, and Think," produced by Crevis, which ran in Tokyo until May and at the Toyota City Museum until September, and opened at the Okayama Prefectural Museum of Art on 9 October 2026.
The technical problem Kohiyama has spent years working around is native to macro capture. At the magnifications required to fill a frame with a weevil or a caddisfly, depth of field collapses to a sliver, so a single exposure holds only a thin plane of the specimen in focus. The standard answer is focus stacking, compositing many frames shot across the focal range into one fully sharp image. Kohiyama, an emeritus professor at Keio University who came to insect imaging from a background in information technology, paired that depth composition approach with micro-photogrammetry, recovering 3D structure via Structure from Motion from many photographs per specimen.
Kohiyama titles this two decade exploration of the microscopic world "Micro Presence," the name of his 2007 installation at NTT InterCommunication Center that enlarged tiny insects to human scale with every part of the body in focus, and some know him as a Micro Presence artist. His photogrammetry models, generated from thousands of photographs per specimen, are collected on his StuLab site alongside color 3D prints made from the same data, and he has shared the meshes on Sketchfab.
However, photogrammetry reconstruction has its limits with these subjects. A mesh or dense point cloud wants continuous, opaque surfaces, and the finest, thinnest, semi-transparent structures, such as the setae and body hairs, the veined membranes of a wing, and the microstructure that gives cuticle its iridescence, run into issues. The insect that reads as fuzzy and layered to the eye arrives as a smooth shell.
3D Gaussian Splatting inverts that representation in a way that happens to suit the subject. Rather than fitting a surface, it describes a scene as a large population of soft, semi-transparent, anisotropic primitives, each with its own position, orientation, scale, opacity, and view dependent color to form a radiance field. Thin, wispy, and translucent structures are reconstructed faithfully out of the box. A field of thousands of overlapping soft ellipsoids can carry a coat of hairs, the partial transparency of a wing, and the angle dependent shimmer of a shell in a way a watertight mesh cannot.
Oshima, whose past practice spans collaborations with Daido Moriyama and Tatsuo Miyajima, has been exploring the move from photogrammetry into radiance fields such as NeRF and Gaussian splatting, and insects covered in thousands of fine hairs demand that a representation hold a great deal of fine detail. For the conversion, Oshima used RealityScan to create COLMAP data and then trained the splats in Postshot, working largely from the same photographs Kohiyama used for his photogrammetry. The splat versions render that detail at a level the earlier photogrammetry did not reach.
Some results surprised Kohiyama because photogrammetry had never produced them at all. The one that surprised him most was a dead leaf mantis. Every time Kohiyama tried to build it in 3D, the forewings and hindwings ended up with multiple holes and never looked right, while the splat holds both. He was also struck by hair detail he had never seen in his photogrammetry models, visible in Oshima's splat of a jewel weevil. According to Oshima, that is when Kohiyama came to fully understand the advantage of the new approach.
Gaussian splatting has been making its way into galleries and museums, bringing art exhibitions online with Yulei back in 2024 and, earlier this year, reconstructing Maria Theresia's gem bouquet at the Natural History Museum in Vienna. Macro Gaussian splatting of insects is a genuinely nascent frontier and others are pushing it independently. Swiss digital artist Dany Bittel's focus stack to splat insect work is a separate line of the same idea.
In the gallery, the installation reads as a paired monitor video piece. Per Oshima and Kohiyama, roughly forty species cycle across two HD displays at about one minute each, presenting the insects in splat form alongside the exhibition's magnified panels and 3D display objects, with Takeshi Yoro's words supplying the show's connective tissue. The Toyota City Museum run added work that was not shown in Tokyo, including 3D printed objects, and a video presentation shows how the splats and the 3D prints were displayed there.
The exhibition is on view at the Okayama Prefectural Museum of Art until 29 November 2026, and more information about the project is available from Crevis.
