Why Gaussian splats killed the 360° tour

A 360 tour is a slideshow with mouse-drag. You stand on a tripod-marked dot and pivot. To get to the next dot, you click a hotspot, and the page replaces the image. There's no real spatial continuity — your brain is stitching together a building you can't actually walk through.

A Gaussian splat is different. It's a real 3D scene rendered in real time on the GPU. You can drift the camera in any direction, not just rotate from a fixed pivot. Customers feel that difference within ten seconds — even if they can't articulate why.

The technical jump

Splats reconstruct geometry + lighting + transparency in one shot from a video walk-around. There's no manual stitching, no panoramic alignment, no "I missed a wall, let me reshoot." The reconstruction handles glass, foliage, hair — things that classic photogrammetry chokes on.

Capture: 60–120 seconds of video on a phone. Processing: 4–8 minutes on consumer GPUs. Playback: 60fps on a 2018 iPhone.

The commercial jump

On Bury3D listings, the average time-on-page roughly doubles when a splat replaces the photo carousel. Anecdotally, conversion-to-viewing climbs because customers who did spend that extra time on the page also pre-qualified themselves.

Compare that to a 360 tour, which most listings page-visitors close inside 5 seconds because the experience reads as "I'm watching someone else navigate a building."

When 360 still wins

A small handful of cases: pure documentation (e.g., a static museum exhibit you want to archive once), or a scene where you need annotated hotspots tied to specific positions. Splats can also do annotations, but the muscle memory of "click this hotspot" is more familiar in a 360.

For 95% of estate, retail, and repair use-cases, splats are now the better default.