Gracia is a platform for truly volumetric 6DoF VR content

Gracia is a technology pipeline and viewing platform for 6DoF volumetric content, available on Quest 3 and PC VR.

Simple stereoscopic 3D photos and videos and videos like Apple’s Spatial Video only offer limited parallax of the view of a scene presented in a rectangle in front of you, and immersive 180° or 360° content like Apple Immersive Video does the same in a hemisphere or sphere.

But the holy grail of immersive real-world content is truly volumetric capture, in which you can move your head or even walk through it—essentially photorealistic VR, captured from the real world rather than created by 3D artists in modeling software. Gracia gives it away today for stills, and claims it will also do it for short videos later this year.

The startup recently raised $1.2 million in seed investment and has 15 developers and designers. He wants to one day be the YouTube of truly voluminous content.

Gracia is possible thanks to Gaussian sprinkling, a relatively new technique for rendering 3D volumes by representing the scene as a collection of overlapping 3D Gaussian functions. The company claims that their specific implementation of Gaussian splash rendering is faster than “any other technology on the market”, which is how it can run on Quest 3 standalone without a PC – albeit at a lower resolution.

The current focus of the platform is photographs, essentially volumetric photographs, which creators can generate using freely available Gaussian splat smartphone apps like Luma to upload to Gracia. But the next frontier is short volumetric video clips, and here Gracia will also handle the generation with in-house technology.

Gracia says “only” 20 GoPro cameras will be needed to capture truly volumetric video, which it claims is significantly smaller than previous volumetric recording technology. However, training a video takes about two minutes per frame, so this is currently a very expensive and time-consuming process.

The company aims to launch short volume videos in August.

The Gracia app is available for download on Quest 3 via SideQuest, or for PC VR via Steam. The startup plans to launch soon on Apple Vision Pro as well.

The company wants to be on the official Quest Store, but its menu system is implemented in 2D Android app mode, which Meta’s store policies currently prohibit, despite the fact that the Steam Link app for Quest also works that way.

Photorealistic recording of this kind is too impressive to experience in VR, even without motion, and a glimpse of a future where memories can eventually be relived exactly as if you were there again. Gracia offers what many expected to be Apple Vision Pro’s “space” photos, currently running on a headset at a fraction of the price.