Preserving Cultural Heritage for Future Generations with Gaussian Splatting

Stone erodes, wood rots, paint fades. Flooding, fire, and conflict can destroy in hours what took centuries to build. Even without catastrophe, the sheer volume of visitors drawn to significant sites causes gradual, irreversible physical damage.

Gaussian Splatting offers something photography and photogrammetry could not: a browser-native, freely explorable 3D record accurate enough to serve as both an educational resource and a forensic archive.

A photograph captures a moment from a fixed point. A Gaussian Splat captures a space from every angle simultaneously — allowing future conservators, researchers, and members of the public to examine details that may no longer exist in physical form.

For architectural heritage in particular, the ability to orbit a structure, examine joints and carvings up close, and understand spatial relationships between elements is invaluable for ongoing conservation research.

Physical access to heritage sites is unevenly distributed. Transport costs, mobility limitations, and geographic barriers mean that the world's most significant cultural spaces remain inaccessible to the vast majority of people who would benefit from experiencing them.

A Spatium Gaussian Splat experience is accessible to anyone with a smartphone. Schools in regions far from major museums can explore exhibitions in detail. Researchers in one country can study sites in another without the carbon cost of travel.

We understand that heritage sites have unique constraints — restricted access windows, sensitivity to equipment, the need for non-invasive capture techniques, and rigorous approval processes.

Spatium's capture team is experienced in working within these constraints. We carry full public liability insurance, can work outside public hours, and our process produces no physical contact with the site. Assets, including raw capture data and the processed splat files, are provided in full as part of our heritage packages.

Digital records are only as valuable as their longevity. Spatium provides full asset ownership — you receive the raw capture dataset, the processed .ply and .splat files, and the browser-ready embed. We also offer long-term CDN hosting and can assist with archival integration with established digital preservation frameworks.