So you’ve heard about the hot new sauce that is 3D Gaussian splatting, and you want to make your own splats using your smartphone. You’re not alone—3D Gaussian splats (also known as 3DGS) have everyone who uses 3D graphics excited. Splats make highly detailed scans that are relatively small in file size, and they can be created without special equipment.

Even though the techniques that make 3D Gaussian splatting possible are less than two years old, you already have several high-quality choices for turning 2D phone images to 3D scans, including Scaniverse, Polycam, and KIRI Engine. (Luma AI previously offered splatting, but it suspended processing for splats last November.) We’ve been testing them out for a few months, and here is what we found!

Scaniverse

Among all the smartphone apps you can use for creating 3D Gaussian splats, Scaniverse is the only one designed to process splats on your device. This offers three important advantages:

  • You can check your scan right after you make it and redo it if there’s a part of the scan you want to improve.

  • It has a smooth and fast user experience, because the app doesn’t have to communicate with a cloud server to upload scans or process them into splats.

  • There’s no internet connection needed to interact with your splats. This is especially useful if you’re in a remote area.

Scaniverse is completely free (unlike other apps, which require subscriptions to access splatting features) and has no limit on the number of splats you can make. There is also unlimited cloud storage for all the splats you upload.

If you’ve never splatted before, take a look at the tips on the website. Once you choose your subject and start recording, you’ll see the ellipsoids taking shape in the recording window as you walk around, which is pretty neat (and also unique to Scaniverse).

After you capture, the splat processes in about a minute. You can’t navigate away from the app during processing, although Scaniverse offers the option to process the splat later.

Once it’s done, you can start playing with your splat immediately. Use your fingers to rotate, pan, and zoom around in the splat. After you’ve explored, the app gives you several options:

  • Post it to the Scaniverse Map, as long as it meets the submission guidelines. (Or create an unlisted splat if you want to share the splat but not make it public.) After posting, go browse the world’s largest collection of Gaussian splats. You can click on other map posts or use the “Discover” feature on the home screen.

  • Share it with the Scaniverse Community and start a conversation with other scanners about things like technique, favorite places to scan, or challenges. You can also ask questions or enter one of the contests!

  • Edit your splat by cropping or adjusting exposure and contrast.

  • Take measurements by tapping two points in your splat and get an instant readout of the real-world distance between them.

  • Create a video of your splat with speed, camera movement and aspect ratio controls that you can download or share to TikTok, Instagram or any other social media that supports video. Give your friends a cinematic view of the places you visit!

  • Upload it to Scaniverse to generate a shareable URL and embed code if you want to use your splat on your website.

  • Export your splat as a PLY or an SPZ, the splatting equivalent of a JPG file. You can use an SPZ in Niantic Studio, or use a PLY in Lens Studio, SuperSplat, Blender or game engines like Unity or Unreal Engine.

Scaniverse is a mobile-first app, so it doesn’t yet have a Web interface like Polycam or Kiri Engine.

Overall, Scaniverse is the easiest way for everybody—including and especially splatting noobs—to create Gaussian splats with a standalone mobile app.

Polycam

Polycam is a subscription-based service with an approachable, easy-to-use interface for capturing images. The recording process is smooth, and there’s a bar at the bottom of the screen that shows you how many images you’ve captured. When you’ve finished, you’ll have the option to choose to create a mesh or a splat, with guidance on which types of objects fare best in each mode.

When you finish recording, you choose the splat option. Polycam begins processing your image by uploading it to a cloud server for processing, which requires a stable internet connection. Keep the app open while you do this or process it later. Processing can take ten or more minutes, or longer depending on how hefty a scan you upload.

Polycam has similar tools to Scaniverse, and you can measure or edit your model. When you’re finished, you can share your model with other Polycam users (with options to create a private or public link) or publish it to Polycam’s “Explore” map. You can also export your project with a wide variety of file extensions, including a special “Splat PLY” for Gaussian splats.

Polycam is a great tool for professionals and easy to use. If you open the Web app, you’ll find your project there ready for editing with similar tools to what you see in the phone app.

Polycam’s main drawbacks are:

  • It costs $26.99 per month (or $12.49/month if you buy a full-year subscription).

  • It’s less community-focused than Scaniverse, which could limit social interaction and sharing opportunities.

  • It requires an internet connection for processing, which may be problematic in areas with poor connectivity or no data service.

  • The processing time can be longer than Scaniverse, taking 10 minutes or more depending on the scan's complexity.

  • Limited free features compared to Scaniverse's all-inclusive offerings, especially for those seeking to make multiple scans without a subscription.

KIRI Engine

The KIRI Engine mobile app is free, but its Gaussian splatting feature is available only to paid users for $17.99 per month. Like Polycam, it uploads projects to the cloud for processing, and you have to join a queue to get your scans back. When we tried out their 3DGS feature to create a model, it took more than an hour for the project to go through the queue for processing (although this is a major improvement over the three hours of queuing time we experienced when we tried out the app last fall).

When you open a new 3DGS project, the app offers a quick demonstration of how to circle around an object while recording. After you finish recording, the app gives you some options before processing, including the ability to generate a mesh model alongside your splat.

When your scan is completed, you can do basic editing. It has a neat feature where you can crop out parts of the scan (shown as a point cloud) using the axes of the image as a guide, or you can do it freehand with a brush.

Once you’ve edited your scan, you can: share it to social media, export it as a PLY file, or create a shareable link, similar to the other apps.

KIRI Engine also has a popular free 3DGS add-on for Blender. They encourage users to capture the splat with KIRI Engine, do initial cropping within the mobile app, then export the PLY file for final rendering with Blender.

The main drawbacks for splatting with KIRI Engine are:

  • It costs $17.99 per month for the splatting feature.

  • It’s not as user friendly as Scaniverse or Polycam.

  • It can take hours to go through the queue for processing splats, so you may have to wait a long time to get feedback on your scan.

Luma AI

NOTE: The Luma AI mobile app no longer supports Gaussian splatting directly. You can capture a scene and export a PLY asset that can be used to render the scene as a splat on a desktop. Luma AI is primarily devoting its computing power to its text- and image-to-video generative AI tool, Dream Machine.

Luma AI is most useful to developers and graphics professionals who know JavaScript. The workflow is not aimed at the casual user, and it takes a number of steps across devices to produce splats.

When you open the Luma AI app, find the purple button at the bottom of the home screen to open a new project. Toggle over to the “object” or “scene” options and begin recording your video. An AR guide will show you a visualization of the camera poses as they are captured.

Once the video is recorded, you upload it to Luma. You can’t process the splats within the app, but it will export a ZIP file that you can render later on a desktop computer. Once the video is processed, you can go to their (hard to find!) dashboard on their website to edit your captures.

If you know JavaScript, you can edit splats using Luma’s WebGL API. You can use the tools in the graphics library to do things like remove layers, add fog, create dynamic lighting or apply transmission effects to your splats. Luma will export your splats as a PLY file.

The “Capture” feature and WebGL are completely free to use, although the processing can take a long time. When we tried out the app before Luma AI suspended captures, it took an hour to go through the processing queue for one scene.

Which mobile splatting app should you choose?

Ask yourself what you need it for and what limitations you might be working with when you are scanning. For easy and quick mobile splatting, Scaniverse has the clear advantage. For graphics professionals looking for additional levels of control, Polycam and KIRI Engine offer good paid mobile apps that integrate well with desktop graphics editing workflows.