In our ongoing research into spatial capture of real environments, we use different types of pipelines. We tried Gaussian splatting with drones, photo cameras, mobiles, and 3D scanners with LiDAR. The endgame is to get an accurate digital twin that looks lifelike, as that’s where the business need is.

Recently, out of curiosity, we tried it with one of the oldest suitable footage we ever captured using a VHS camera. This didn’t turn out bad at all—the original resolution is 240p, and it works quite well for a more artistic look. We’re pretty sure that if we put more effort into cleaning and preprocessing the original footage, we would get a representation good enough to obtain accurate measurements of the building or even use it as a template to recreate it quickly in 3D software.

Looking at this reinvented 20-year-old footage in 3D makes us think that “reliving the memories” from a Minority Report movie is not that far ahead. The completely different question, though, is how much we can trust external services to keep our memories safe, private, and 100% original.