u/Bingobango1001

We added support for animated Gaussian splats to STAGEit recently, which immediately made us want to create our own.

So the latest STAGEit Optimiser now has an alpha Gaussian splat generator, built on top of Apple’s SHARP library.

It’s very much alpha. Results vary, and this is not a tool for scanning your room. We’ve had the best results with people and smaller/macro subjects where you can isolate what you actually want to capture.

The basic workflow is:

• Drop in a video - we recommend 10 seconds or less
• Crop to the part of the image you actually want
• Trim the clip in the app (for long videos, trim them before importing)
• For people, enable People Cutout and Depth Cleanup
• Choose the depth you want to retain - smaller values help avoid unwanted background splats
• Generate an animated splat sequence

For reference, some depths we’ve used in our examples are 0.3m for the apple, 0.8m for Merlin (the Golden Retriever), and 1.0m for the lady in blue.

Processing can take 30-60 minutes, so we strongly recommend testing at 5fps first. Once you’re happy with the result, 24fps has been our sweet spot. You can go to 30fps, but it starts getting pretty demanding on the device.

There’s also a focal-length control, but unless you know your source footage was shot significantly differently from a standard ~30mm lens, we’d leave it alone.

We’ve also added wireless transfer directly into STAGEit. In the latest STAGEit, open a scene → Settings → Network → Host. STAGEit Optimiser can then connect directly to the device and send across both optimised USDZs and generated splat sequences - no more AirDropping files back and forth! Huzzah (this has been one of the best updates)

The generated .splatseq file is essentially an archive of the individual splat frames. If you have another app or workflow that can deal with splat sequences, you can rename the file to .zip and access the individual frames.

Otherwise, currently STAGEit is our playback option for the animated sequence. There is a free version of STAGEit Creator that allows you to try this, including the networking workflow.

It’s experimental, occasionally messy, and definitely still alpha, but we’re already getting some really interesting results from it.

STAGEit Optimiser is free, so feel free to give it a try.

https://spatialcreative.com/stageit-optimiser/
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/stageit-creator/id6504801331

Delighted that RealityKit now supports Gaussian Splats in iOS 27.

Last week we got animated splats working in STAGEit, which was great, but actually making them still seems to be a bit of a specialist dark art.

There is a way to do it ourselves though, and while it’s not as polished as what Gracia AI is doing, you can do it on your own Mac with just images and video as the input.

So we’ve started building that process into STAGEit Optimiser.

This is one of my first tests, my dog Merlin, captured on my phone and turned into an animated splat.

It’s still pretty rough around the edges, but it’s working really well, so we’ll get an alpha version into Optimiser soon and let people have a play with it.

It's a rapidly developing area Gaussian Splats... We managed to get this sample working in STAGEit using the examples here https://atlux.one/4dgs

A quick heads-up: the STAGEit Founders licence is coming to an end.

STAGEit is moving back to a subscription model, so if you want unlimited access to STAGEit (now called STAGEit Creator) without a subscription, grab a Founders licence before we make the switch.

Going forward, we’re focusing STAGEit around immersive presentations. Creator will absolutely continue to be developed and updated (there’s actually a pretty big update in the works), but those updates will increasingly be geared towards giving you more ways to create amazing immersive presentations.

That includes support for new visionOS 27 features, projection onto real-world surfaces, fabric and cloth, more powerful ways to build animations directly inside STAGEit, and lots more.

We’re also planning a desktop / iPad companion app, making it much easier to bring models and assets from your Mac or iPad into STAGEit and move seamlessly between devices. And further ahead, we want to make it easier for teams to work together on the same presentations.

So development isn’t stopping. Quite the opposite. We’re just much clearer about what we want STAGEit Creator to become.

Just to be completely clear: the Founders licence is for STAGEit Creator. It does not include our other apps, STAGEit Presenter or STAGEit Host.

The Founders licence will disappear as soon as Apple approves the new versions of STAGEit, so we don’t have an exact end date. It could be pretty soon.

Shout if you have any questions.

https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/stageit/id6504801331

https://spatialcreative.com/stageit-optimiser/

My workflow starts with screenshots of the things I want to model. Sometimes I use ChatGPT to clean up the images first, removing anything I don’t want Meshy to generate. In this example, I didn’t remove the taps from one of the reference images and Meshy put them in...

I then generate the models in Meshy 7 and texture them at 2K. For this sort of AVP work I’ve found 2K is generally enough. 4K is fine if I need the extra detail, but 8K is usually overkill.

The interesting thing about Meshy 7 is that I think one of the reasons the models look so good is because it creates millions of triangles, significantly more geometry than I was getting from previous Meshy AI models.

Unfortunately, that also makes them pretty much unusable on Apple Vision Pro without some serious optimisation.

I’ve tried using Meshy’s built-in optimisation tools, but with this much geometry I find the models can start to deform as you bring the triangle count down.

So I download the original model as a USDZ.

We’ve been developing our own USDZ optimiser based on many, many hours we’ve spent manually optimising models in Blender for AVP.

Rather than simply applying a blanket reduction, it first analyses the USDZ and suggests changes. You can choose which recommendations you want to apply, and it then creates a new optimised USDZ. It’s all using Blender under the hood.

It’s still in development, but we’re considering releasing it as a standalone Mac app. Would this be useful to anyone else working with USDZ/AVP models?

Once everything is optimised, I bring the content into STAGEit Creator.

For this project I’m actually modelling a real bathroom before installing it, so I use billboards of the manufacturers’ specification sheets and dimension drawings inside the scene to make sure everything is correctly sized and positioned. Meshy gets surprisingly close on scale, but obviously it isn’t going to give me millimetre accuracy from a photograph.

I can then preview the whole thing at full scale on Apple Vision Pro.

This turned out to be genuinely useful rather than just a visualisation exercise, I was able to work out and install all of the pipework before the bath, shower and other fittings had even been ordered or arrived.

So essentially:

Screenshot → ChatGPT cleanup → Meshy 7 → USDZ → Optimise → STAGEit Creator → Preview at 1:1 scale on AVP

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/stageit/id6504801331

https://spatialcreative.com/

https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/stageit/id6504801331

https://spatialcreative.com/

I think this was my favourite experience with Apple Vision Pro to date.

We were working with our partner, G2E, who process Mexico City’s organic waste and turn it into biochar fertiliser. Together, we created a 20-minute immersive presentation using STAGEit Presenter, immersive video, animated 3D mixed reality content and interactive scenes.

The comments we received afterwards were amazing. It was clear the experience had made an impact. Apple Vision Pro allowed us to transport delegates to Mexico City so they could see both the problem and the solution first-hand, rather than simply hearing about it.

If you’re interested, we’ve just published the full case study. I’d love to hear what you think.

https://spatialcreative.com/case-studies/stageit-presenter-g2e-hamburg-sustainability-conference/

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/stageit/id6504801331

We’ve been using Globular Cluster headsets with our Vision Pros at events, mainly because they let people wear their own glasses.

They’ve worked really well, but the trade-off was that we couldn’t use a light shield, so you’d get some light coming in around the edges.

Globular Cluster have now made a silicone light shield and it pretty much solves that problem. It’s really thin and flexible, so people can still wear their own glasses, but now we can block out the light as well.

For us that’s kind of the ideal setup. We’re trying to get people into a Vision Pro and into the experience as quickly as possible, without messing around with inserts or swapping things between people.

Anyone else using Vision Pro for events, demos or multi-user setups? What are you doing about glasses / fit / light seals?

TL;DW:

We’re making a few big changes over the next few weeks. All STAGEit products will soon move to a subscription model, and the STAGEit Creator Founder’s License will disappear when we launch.

If you’re already a Founder, nothing changes, you’ll keep STAGEit Creator for life, exactly as promised.

Presenter and Host are brand-new apps built for completely different jobs, so they aren’t covered by the original Founder’s License.

Splitting everything into focused apps means we can build better tools, move faster, and keep improving the whole STAGEit ecosystem for years to come. Thanks to everyone who’s supported us so far, it genuinely wouldn’t be possible without you.

Questions? Reach out to us here https://spatialcreative.com

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/stageit/id6504801331

Added wind into STAGEit to see how it worked with the new Fabric support in visionOS 27.

It was awesome! Combined with the other environmental effects available on Apple Vision Pro; lighting, gravity and the realism of the new Cloth API, you can create some incredibly believable and compelling scenes.

The bit I really like is how the virtual fabric is sympathetic to the movement of the real trees. It’s a subtle detail, but when both are responding to the same breeze, it does a surprisingly good job of blending the digital and physical worlds together.

I'm genuinely excited by some of the things Apple is unlocking in visionOS 27.

Fabric (Cloth API), projectors, Gaussian splatting support in RealityKit… as developers, these additions give us real confidence in the future of visionOS and Vision Pro, whatever form the headset might take in the years ahead.

I really enjoyed experimenting with the Cloth API and adding Fabric to STAGEit. That got me excited. Then I started playing with projectors and that took it to another level!

The combination of lighting, physics and projection is incredibly convincing, and I genuinely can’t wait to see what happens when we can start bringing all three together - Fabric, projection and Gaussian splats.

So, as promised after my last post, here’s a sneak peek at what we’ve been doing with projectors in STAGEit.

I start indoors, playing around with light, images and video, before deciding to take it outside and try it on some rather larger subjects.

Mixed results, some surprises, and lots to think about.

If you want to learn more get in touch at https://spatialcreative.com

We’ve been experimenting with cloth in visionOS 27 for STAGEit, and we’re really impressed with it.

Cloth will become a feature in STAGEit and will adopt many of the same properties already available for other primitive shapes.

We think it’s going to be particularly exciting for STAGEit Presenter. It opens up some really interesting possibilities for creating impactful effects in immersive presentations without them feeling gimmicky. The reality and feel of the cloth implementation is incredibly convincing, which is what makes it so effective.

We’re also looking at some of the other new visionOS 27 features, in particular projection.

Demo of that coming next week!

When Apple Vision Pro launched, the small team I work with became completely obsessed with its potential.

Our employer gave us the freedom to explore that future, and from that freedom we designed and built STAGEit. We poured ourselves into it because we genuinely believed spatial computing was going to change the way people communicate.

Although we created it, STAGEit belonged to the company.

For us though, it always felt like our product.

Two years later, it became clear that our passion for Apple Vision Pro was greater than the company’s desire to continue investing in it.

So… we bought it.

The core team behind STAGEit has acquired the intellectual property, and this July we’re relaunching STAGEit as an independent product.

This means we can finally build the roadmap we’ve been dreaming about since day one.

The biggest evolution is that STAGEit becomes STAGEit Creator.

Creating incredible spatial scenes is only half the story. Sharing them is the other half.

That’s why we’re introducing STAGEit Presenter for Apple Vision Pro, alongside STAGEit Host for iPhone and iPad. Together they’ll let you present one or many Apple Vision Pro headsets, combining STAGEit scenes with immersive videos into a seamless presentation.

Our vision is simple: if you can create something amazing in Apple Vision Pro, you should be able to share that experience with clients, colleagues, students, friends or family just as easily.

If you’re already a STAGEit user, thank you. Your support over the past two years helped convince us this was worth fighting for.

You’ll receive all the ongoing improvements to STAGEit Creator, together with an entirely new way to present and share the experiences you create.

Owning the product ourselves is equal parts exciting and daunting, but we couldn’t be more motivated.

We’re just getting started, and we can’t wait to show you what’s coming in July.

We've been working our socks off on this for a while - looking for a full launch of STAGEit Presenter, STAGEit Host and an update to STAGEit (soon to be called STAGEit Creator) in July!

STAGEit Presenter lets you build presentations using immersive video content alongside STAGEit Scenes featuring 3D content, animation, special effects, and more.

If you want to show your immersive content or creative vision to someone using your Apple Vision Pro, we designed Presenter to avoid all the faff of setting up a Guest User every time.

Using the STAGEit Host app for iPhone and iPad, you can control presentations across one or multiple devices. So, if you are lucky enough to have more than one AVP, you can drive the entire presentation directly from your iPhone. You can also preview and follow the presentation on an iPad using the AR Viewer.

I’m really excited about these apps because I think they massively expand the practical and collaborative uses of Apple Vision Pro.