At the AWE Europe event, one of the standout encounters I had wasn’t even part of the official exhibit. Instead, it was an impromptu demonstration in the corridor featuring the dynamic volumetric scenes showcased by Gracia—and I knew I had to share this captivating experience with you.
Discovering Gracia
[Gracia Image]
A girl caught in a web chrysalis showcases a short story within Gracia’s offerings (Image by Gracia)
Gracia is a fascinating startup with a bold ambition: to evolve into the YouTube of volumetric content using Gaussian Splats. Their futuristic vision is for creators to upload 3D scenes—potentially captured on smartphones—to Gracia’s servers. From there, audiences can dive into these worlds, either solo or with friends, experiencing them just as the creator intended.
Though Gracia is just embarking on this journey, they’ve launched an application for Quest and Steam VR that allows users to explore a handful of scenes curated by the Gracia team. On Quest, users are limited to these predefined scenes, while Steam VR also offers community-scanned environments. The powerful yet resource-heavy Gaussian Splats mean that, on Quest, a simplified version is used, which naturally affects visual quality—but it’s commendable that this experience runs on Quest at all, and the Gracia team takes great pride in their optimizations.
Recently, I had the chance to try Gracia on Quest. The experience was intriguing and brimming with potential, but I noted some drawbacks, such as visible scan artifacts and a clunky UI. Unfortunately, my PC at the time couldn’t handle the hardware demands for a full comparison with PC performance.
Thankfully, during the AWE event, investor Tipatat Chennavasin came to the rescue, offering me an impromptu demo on his high-powered laptop. This showcase allowed me to witness Gracia’s capabilities on PC, especially featuring its latest addition: moving volumetric scenes.
The Magic of Moving Volumetric Scenes
Gracia’s team has digitized several brief animated scenes, typically featuring people, lasting between 10-30 seconds. These scenes can now be experienced in the SteamVR version of Gracia, where they play out like short volumetric videos, all rendered with Gaussian Splats. This represents a step forward since current alternatives, like Meta Horizon Hyperscape, focus mainly on static visuals. However, this leap in technology comes with challenges. As reported by Upload VR, these clips are complex to capture and render, currently making them an experimental feature:
Gracia captured these scenes using costly 3D scanning studio setups, taking six minutes to process a single frame. This translates to weeks of AWS compute time per minute, though parallelization can reduce this in practice. Furthermore, these clips require over 300 megabytes per second to download. Streaming such content needs a 2.4-gigabit internet connection, which few possess. Gracia anticipates their compression improvements to make this feasible on fast modern internet within a year, and they are exploring cloud VR streaming.
Experiencing Gracia’s Moving Scenes on PC
Tipatat set up Gracia and handed me a Quest headset adorned with an eye-catching orange headband and Link cable to connect it to the PC. Upon donning the headset, I initially encountered the clumsy UI, which I quickly bypassed. What awaited was the astonishing sight of a blonde girl dancing before me—I was genuinely awestruck. (Forgive the pun, but AWE was the event, after all.)
The visuals on PC were leagues ahead of the Quest’s output. While Quest’s Cyberpunk scene showed potential, higher compression left minor artifacts reminiscent of fuzz on the girl’s skin. But on the PC version, those issues evaporated—the visuals truly shone. Although not perfectly lifelike, with some skin resembling brush strokes, the realism was striking and even surpassed that of Metahumans.
The most remarkable element was the girl’s fluid movement in the scene. Viewers could circle around her, which amplified the realism to a breathtaking degree. At one point, I crouched low for a new perspective, which Tipatat humorously remarked upon by saying, “You perv, you’re trying to look under her skirt!” I assure you it was purely for a different viewpoint, whether they believed me or not.
This comical moment led me to ponder the potential for such technology within the adult industry. A high-quality, movable depiction available in any setting could herald a new era in adult entertainment. Such innovation also has the power to drive broader technological advancements, pushing the boundaries of Gaussian Splat technology further.
Another notable feature was the ability to manipulate the scene, resizing the dancing figure to fit in my hand—transforming her into a miniature delight. The smaller dimension masked some visual imperfections, enhancing her lifelike appearance significantly.
I could also pause the moving scenes, allowing me to inspect the details, such as the semi-transparent fabric of her dress.
Beyond the dancing girl, I explored two additional scenes: one portraying a joyous family dance, resonating with palpable happiness, and another of a chef teaching a culinary lesson. The cooking scene, although still impressive, revealed more scanning artifacts and seemed less engaging compared to the others.
Closing Thoughts
I hadn’t anticipated Gracia’s moving volumetric scenes to be quite as astounding as they were. This technology may indeed represent the next leap in content sharing, allowing people to immortalize precious moments not just in still images or videos, but as dynamic 3D experiences you can revisit at will. This vision is undoubtedly exciting.
However, while quality has reached a point where general consumers could embrace it, practical limitations persist. The capturing equipment remains costly and cumbersome, and the content requires substantial resources both to download and to render. The envisioned future of capturing and displaying 3D memories directly from our mobile devices is certainly a thrilling prospect.
For now, if you possess a powerful PCVR setup, I wholeheartedly recommend experiencing these moving scenes on Gracia—they truly are extraordinary.
(Header image by Gracia)
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