Turn Your iPhone Videos into 3D Scenes with CorbeauSplat

Ever record a video on your phone and wish you could just… step into it? Not in a sci-fi way, but in a "let me look around from a different angle" kind of way. For developers and creators, building tools to capture real-world spaces in 3D has often meant expensive hardware or complex photogrammetry setups.

What if you could skip all that and turn a simple video from your iPhone into an interactive 3D model you can view right on your Mac? That’s the neat trick CorbeauSplat pulls off.

What It Does

CorbeauSplat is a macOS application that takes the raw spatial video data from newer iPhone models (the ones that capture depth information) and processes it into a 3D Gaussian Splat. If that last term sounds like jargon, think of it as a modern, efficient point cloud. Instead of a mesh of polygons, the scene is represented by a cloud of tiny, smart particles that create a convincing, viewable 3D reconstruction. You shoot the video, run it through this tool, and get a file you can explore from any angle.

Why It's Cool

The magic here is in the simplicity and accessibility. The hard problems—extracting depth data, aligning frames, and creating a 3D representation—are handled for you. You provide the video; CorbeauSplat provides the 3D scene.

It’s built on top of significant open-source work, like the gaussian-splatting-mac viewer, meaning it leverages cutting-edge research (3D Gaussian Splatting) and packages it into a focused, single-purpose tool. It demonstrates a powerful use case for the spatial data our phones are now capturing, moving it from a novelty into a developer-friendly asset. Imagine quickly prototyping AR environments, creating assets for games, or documenting real-world spaces without specialized equipment.

How to Try It

Ready to splat something? Here’s the quick start:

1. Grab the Code: The project is on GitHub. Head over to freddewitt/CorbeauSplat and clone the repository.
2. Get Your Video: You’ll need a spatial video recorded on a compatible iPhone (iPhone 15 Pro or later). Transfer the .mov file to your Mac.
3. Build & Run: The repo is an Xcode project. Open it, build it, and run the application. The interface is straightforward—point it to your video file and let it process.
4. View Your Splat: Once processing is complete, it will generate a .ply file that can be viewed in any compatible 3D Gaussian Splat viewer. The project documentation can guide you on the best options.

Final Thoughts

CorbeauSplat feels like a glimpse into a handy new workflow. It takes a complex technical pipeline and condenses it into a single button for a specific, useful task. For developers, it’s a great example of how to productize an advanced computer vision technique. For tinkerers and creators, it’s a surprisingly direct path from your camera roll to a navigable 3D world. It might not be for every project, but for the ones where it fits, it saves an enormous amount of time and expertise.

Give it a shot with a video of your desk or backyard. The moment you start orbiting around a scene you captured yourself is a small but genuine "whoa" moment.

Follow for more interesting projects: @githubprojects