Buyers can now open a link and walk through a house with no appointment, no app, and no agent required on-site. That’s the pitch behind 3D Gaussian Splatting tours, and according to LinkedIn commentator Alex Okros, the workflow that produces them costs around $200 in tooling compared to the $3,500 proprietary capture services that used to own this space. Okros estimates those figures based on his own analysis; legacy service pricing varies by market and provider. The real question isn’t whether the technology works. It’s who ends up doing the work, and who pockets the margin.
How the Technology Actually Works
The shift from polygon meshes to photorealistic splats is what makes browser-based walkthroughs possible on consumer hardware.
3D Gaussian Splatting represents a physical space as millions of small 3D shapes (“splats”), each carrying color, depth, and opacity data. That data enables photorealistic real-time rendering on consumer hardware, including phones. The finished tour lives in a browser tabort does let compressed tours run on a Quest 3 directly from the browser
The workflow, outlined by sources including Menon Lab and Splatmart, runs from phone capture to published link using entirely free tools. You shoot the property with slow, overlapping video using apps like Polycam, Luma AI, or KIRI Engine and run structure-from-motion processing to calculate camera positions and train the splat model. Then you clean up floating artifacts and optimize the scene inside SuperSplat, an open-source, browser-based editor built on the PlayCanvas engine, and share the URL. Choosing among the best cameras for your capture workflow can meaningfully affect the quality of the final splat model.
Practical constraints are real, though. Mirrors, blank walls, bright windows, and mixed lighting all require careful capture and sometimes re-capture, and editing is streamlined but not fully automated. MLS portals and brokerages have not standardized splat tour support, so this remains an emerging workflow rather than an industry default.
“Alex Okros, LinkedIn: A $200 tool is replacing a $3,500 service in the real estate market.”
What This Means for Agents, Freelancers, and Buyers
The economics favor freelancers with a phone and a free tool stack, but agents retain the parts of the transaction that a browser tour cannot replicate.
Freelancers are already pricing residential scans at $300 to $650 and commercial spaces at $800 to $2,000-plus, with clients ranging from realtors and Airbnb hosts to architects and car dealers, according to AdiiX on X and multiple LinkedIn commentators. The margin is real because the overhead is close to nothing.
The tooling cost is effectively zero beyond the phone you already own.
Agents don’t disappear from this picture; their role shifts. Splat tours handle the initial filtering, letting buyers rule properties in or out before anyone schedules a showing. That cuts the number of in-person visits an agent has to run. Negotiation, pricing strategy, inspection, appraisal, and the legal machinery of closing a transaction remain human work; no credible
PlayCanvas’ own documentation lists real estate, construction progress, product visualization, and virtual tourism as production use cases for Gaussian splatting, which signals this is already past the experimental stage. As proptech commentator Kial G. put it on LinkedIn: “Technology doesn’t kill industries. It kills people who refuse to adapt.”
The Practical Takeaway
Listings with photorealistic browser tours are differentiating in competitive markets, particularly for remote buyers.
Agents who add this to their toolkit, or who partner with freelancers who offer it, stand to qualify buyers faster and run fewer wasted showings. That efficiency gain is measurable, regardless of where the technology goes next.
