Gaussian splatting has spent three years being the most exciting thing in real-time graphics and one of the most annoying to actually do. You needed a careful capture, a GPU and a training run, a .ply file of unhelpful size, and a viewer that the person you wanted to show it to did not have.
Insta360 Spatial Capture arrives in the United States on September 28, 2026, in version 2.34.0 of the Insta360 mobile app, and it collapses that pipeline into three taps.
What it does
Record a 360 video of a room or an object on an Insta360 X6, X5, or X4 Air. In the app, open the Spatial Capture page, select the footage, and tap Generate. Processing happens in the cloud and takes roughly one to two hours. What comes back is a 3D Gaussian splat scene you can move through.
From there the app lets you add effects and author custom camera paths through the scene, then either export the result as a video or share an interactive link — and the link works without the recipient installing an app or downloading a file.
Free tier: four 3DGS scenes per month.
Why the sharing link is the actual news
The camera support is the headline and the wrong thing to focus on. The important design decision is that the output is a URL.
Every previous consumer-adjacent splat workflow died at distribution. You could make something remarkable and then had no way to put it in front of anyone without asking them to install software. A splat that opens in a browser from a link is a splat you can put in a newsletter, a portfolio, a grant application, an exhibition wall label with a QR code. That changes what the format is for — from a technical demo into something closer to how we treat a video embed.
The custom camera path tool matters for the same reason. A splat is a space, not a shot; handing people an authored move through it is the difference between a dataset and a piece.
The honest limits
It is cloud processing, not on-device. One to two hours per scene, on someone else’s machines, with whatever that implies about privacy for interior spaces and about what happens if the service changes terms. Four free scenes a month is generous for trying it and thin for a production workflow.
It is still photogrammetric capture, which means it inherits the usual failure modes: reflective and transparent surfaces confuse it, thin structures disappear, and anything that moves during the capture becomes a smear. A 360 camera actually helps here — the full sphere gives the solver far more parallax per second of shooting than sweeping a phone — but it does not repeal the physics.
And this is a static splat, not the 4D moving captures that Gracia has been shipping to Quest 3 and Vision Pro. Rooms and objects, not performances.
For people making things
If you build spatial work, this is now the cheapest plausible route from a physical place to a shareable 3D scene, and the X4 Air sits well under the price of a dedicated capture rig. Obvious uses: documenting an installation in a way that actually conveys the space, scanning a studio or a site as reference geometry, building location plates for XR pieces, or archiving a show after deinstall — the thing photographs have never managed.
Insta360 announced the US date on September 19. The feature had already rolled out in other markets.
Related Reading
- Insta360 Spatial Capture is officially coming to the U.S. on Sep. 28 — Insta360 on X
- Spatial Capture for Insta360 X6 — Newsshooter
- Insta360 X6 turns 360 video into explorable 3D scenes — ProVideo Coalition
- Insta360 Spatial Capture turns your X6 footage into a place you can explore — The Gadgeteer
- Gracia’s Moving Volumetric Captures Are Now Streamable — UploadVR