Apologies in advance, this is unedited stream of consciousness

OK, we have talked about 3DGS for a while now on the podcast, from news items last year to full discussions in June (I think). For the most part, I have stuck with traditional structure-from-motion/close-range photogrammetry in my day to day processing and use. I had students do collection using Scaniverse, RealityCapture (now RealityScan), or similar app to get a sense of what could be done, but I didn’t really use it.

But, things changed as processes became more streamlined and conversations continue to grow. We at VerySpatial have always leaned a little toward the geovisualization side, so it was probably inevitable we would take our different approaches to gaussian splats. I even waited impatiently through the spring until education site licenses got access to esri’s reality capture tools to see how they compared to some of the open source and trial software that I had moved toward.

Instead of going through things I have tried, I am going to highlight what I have used this month (mostly because otherwise the list is too long). My work falls into two use cases and one curiosity. The first use case is regular drone flights on most Sunday mornings over the various construction that is going on around campus. I have been doing these flights since I started my current job in summer of 2022, so I have 4 years of data sitting around that I am slowly referencing to get it into a time aware format for our facilities group to use with as-builts and other construction records. So, why not through some lovely gaussian splats into the mix. The morning we left for the UC I flew one of the current construction projects, processed the gaussian splat it in ArcGIS Reality for ArcGIS Pro and uploaded it to ArcGIS Online. The traditional geospatial workflow, but the problem is that if I want to share it in Superspl.at or if Sue wants to use it in PlayCanvas, we can’t. At the UC there was a lot of talk about the news item we discussed in the spring of industry support for glTF 2.0, but I still can’t export a ‘gaussian splat layer’ to a .ply or .sog (etc) as far as I can tell (please let me know if I am just missing this capability in my rush).

So, I am also generally running my traditional processing in Agisoft Metashape to get my ortho, but I can also export the aligned cameras as a COLMAP to take into a 3dgs training app. I have generally been using Lichtfeld Studio and I have had good results when I prepped well I have also used RealityScan to align images and I have to admit that it is a great free way to process drone imagery even for traditional models in addition to a COLMAP export. I did also use PIX4DMatic for a trial and was happy with the results, but I am having trouble giving them money (no really, it was hard to contact an actual person. I had to do a virtual training session just so I could ask one of the trainers to get sales to contact me), so it isn’t in my daily tools at this point.

My second use case is working with 360 video, and this one I am still working on my process. I have video captures of some of the locations that Sue and I have been visiting over the last few years. The videos were collected for just that, video. So while I can use them for training 3dgs, they weren’t collected with masking me out in mind (I figured I would just generate an mp4 that focused anywhere but me after all). Some tools, especially online tools will ingest 360 video directly, even in proprietary formats like Insta360’s insv. But I have been using tools like pano2views to pull frames from the video and pull oriented photos from the 360 frame. Thanks again to Epic for making a tool that I can use for free. Once I have the extracted photos, I have been taking them into the various tools. But this has only been for quick tests since the campus data project is higher on my list of todos.

The final curiosity is using lidar point clouds with the imagery to develop 3dgs. I haven’t had the time to do this. I have, in the past, used this to create usdz files from meshes built on scans with iPad or iPhone Pro’s, but the app I used didn’t seem to maintain the raw imagery so I can’t reprocess it two years later, but I am still hoping (fruitlessly) that I am just missing a dataset somewhere. But, old projects in tools like Kiri Engine or PIX4DCatch can probably be able to be rerun to generate 3dgs from older collections though I haven’t had a chance to check this theory.

So, that is what I am using in July 2026. If you have a workflow or recommendations, let me know via email. I may have tried it in months before July, but I clearly didn’t stick with it this month at least. Oh…and I am currently trying out Postshot and aholo, but I just started with those (I know, I saved most people’s ‘go to’ for a later test).

The first splat below was created using Metashape to align and generate a COLMAP, then trained in Lichtfeld Studio and uploaded to SuperSpl.at

The splat below was generated in ArcGIS Reality for ArcGIS Pro and published to AGO.

Some of our current questions 

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• YouTube (audio only)
• AVSP – Episode 789 Transcript (docx)

Web corner

• Destination Earth

Topic:

• Questions we currently have about Geography/geospatial

Music: 

• Around You (Ft. Alyssa) by REYUS

News round-up

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• YouTube (audio only)
• AVSP – Episode 788 Transcript (docx)

News:

• US Supreme Court rules that 4th Amendment includes location data
• National Geographic Museum of Exploration opens
• Explore the stars in VR
• ArcGIS Online June update
• Climate.us
• ECMWF releases earthkit 1.0
• Mapping underground fungi that help our planet
• Sentinel 1A mission ends
• Google Earth Pro desktop end of life

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• MapTap

Gaussian Splatting

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• YouTube (audio only)
• AVSP – Episode 787 Transcript (docx)

News:

• DGEO at Clark
• SpatialSQL moves to general availability
• MCP expanding for geospatial 
• Geoscientists map continent-sized geostructure under Antarctica
• Russian satellites jamming GPS signals

Web corner

• Mega geocache

Topic:

• Gaussian Splats 
  • Apple releases 3D Gaussian Splats 
  • NYT R&D Guide to Gaussian Splats

Events:

• 2026 IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium, 9 – 14 August,  Washington, D.C.
• Applied Geoinformatics for Society and Environment AGSE 2026, 21-25 September, Kumasi, Ghana 
• Harvard Center for Geographic Analysis 20th Anniversary Conference, 2-3 October, Boston, MA

Music: 

• “In This Together” by Neighbor

GIS Careers 

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• YouTube (audio only)
• AVSP – Episode 786 Transcript (docx)

News:

• Upcoming unmanned NASA moon missions in 2026
• Spexi and Niantic Spatial deliver a drone-to-3D pipeline
• Long Island Sound Lawn Fertilizer Pollution Tool 

Web corner

• UK Geography New National Curriculum Change

Topic:

• Thoughts on The GIS Industry Has Already Split in Two

Events:

• Commercial UAV Expo: 1-3 September, Las Vegas
• CaGIS Conference – 8-11 September, St. Louis
• NACIS: 21-24 October, Milwaukee
• GeoWeek 2027: 23-25 February, Salt Lake City  call for speakers

Music: 

• Pace by Brody Myles

UCGIS

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• YouTube (audio only)
• AVSP – Episode 785 Transcript (docx)

News:

• Grass 8.5.0
• 2026 Canadian Census Soundtrack 
• VertiGIS Acquires 1Spatial
• FME Flow and MCP

Web corner

• Historica AI Interactive Map 

Topic:

• Amy Rock of the UCGIS @ AAG

Events:

• Global Public Health and Epidemiology Congress (G-PHEC 2026): 21 – 23 September, London,UK, and online
• 17th Conference on Spatial Information Theory (COSIT) – 22–25 September, York  

Music: 

• Those Days Were Ours by Saints of Valory

PIX4D

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• YouTube (audio only)
• AVSP – Episode 784 Transcript (docx)

News:

• Sketchup, meet Claude
• ESA’s Celeste in-orbit demonstrator transmits first signal
• The Map Shop Australia closing

Web corner

• https://paleolatitude.org/

Topic:

• Pix4D @ AAG

Events:

• Commercial UAV Expo: 1-3 September, Las Vegas
• S+SNZ Conference 2026: 9-11 September, Auckland, NZ
• UAS Summit & Expo: 13-14 October, Grand Forks, ND

Angela Lee of Esri

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• YouTube (audio only)
• AVSP – Episode 783 Transcript (docx)

News:

• Artemis II

Web corner

• National Council for Geographic Education GeoCircle Virtual Meetups

Topic:

• Angel Lee, Director of Education Solutions at Esri

Events:

• GISPro: October 12-15, Milwaukee
• NCGE Annual Conference: October 16 – 18, Richmond, Virginia
• 81st SEDAAG Annual Meeting: 22 – 23 November, Tuscaloosa – Call for papers/posters.

Music: UKE Like It by Brady Grey

BayGeo Conversation

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News:

• Spatial computing grows as an investment trend
• Satellites confirm old sailor myth

Web corner

• Financial Times (FT) Magazine special feature on mapping a changing world

Topic:

• AAG interview, Mike from BayGeo

Events:

• WV GeoCon: 1-3 June, Morgantown

Music: Way It Feels by Alt Bloom

Reflections

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• AVSP – Episode 781 Transcript (docx)

News:

• QGIS 4.0 Norrköping release
• Google Maps and Gemini
• ADA Web & Mobile Rule countdown
• CMU uses Sleep Cycle data to detect outbreaks

Web corner:

• ESRI 3D interactive Dance of Continents 

Topic:

• https://blog.geomusings.com/2026/01/28/post-gis-revisited/
• https://blog.geomusings.com/2026/03/02/when-geospatial-is-consumed-at-ai-scale/

Events:

• Louisiana Remote Sensing & GIS Workshop: 14-16 April in Lafayette Louisiana 
• ACH 2026: 24-26 June, Virtual
• 2026 ASPRS International Technical Symposium: 5-8 October, Virtual 
• GIS-PRO 2026: 12-15 October, Milwaukee

Music: Sad That I’m Still Sad by Liminal