I tried to make Gaussian Splats 1000x faster and somehow ended up having made an iPhone app
This started with me wanting to train my first Gaussian Splat on my MacBook Air. It took 3.5 hours on and the thing got so hot that I filled a ZipLoc bag with cold water and balanced the laptop on top.
That was basically the start of my rabbit hole.
I gave myself a purposefully stupid goal: Make the training 1,000x faster. Not because I thought I would get there, but because I wanted to see how far AI (Fable 5) can push the whole pipeline.
To make a long story short: I started using COLMAP and Brush on the MacBook, and ended 4 weeks later with a whole custom pipeline running direct on the iPhone. No LiDAR, no cloud. The scan that took 3.5 hours initially finished in under one minute with almost identical quality.
At one point it stopped being an experiment and I decided to turn it into an iOS app: Scantic. It got released just yesterday.
The app is completely free, and I would love to hear what people think, is someone else playing with fast 3DGS on iPhone, MacOS, or mobile?
Here is the AppStore link: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/scantic/id6795293934
And here is an example scan you can view in your browser: https://scantic.app/s/GjKU2G7GFPnCdAMoC-h28A
