Live sport in 4D Gaussian Splatting, with Gracia

A basketball game captured on 16 Argus rig cameras and rebuilt as 4D Gaussian Splatting almost in real time, with Gracia. A virtual camera flies through the real play and freezes on the moment the score goes in.

Gracia build 4D Gaussian Splatting systems, and we have been working with them on a version made for sport and other live events. The idea is simple to say and hard to do: capture the action from cameras all round the court, reconstruct it in 3D almost as it happens, and fly a virtual camera through the real play, with a frozen moment at the point that matters, a score, a block, a save. This basketball game was the first full run, and the clips on this page are straight out of the system.

The rig: 16 Argus cameras on lighting stands

For this capture we used 16 cameras from our Argus rig, mounted in pairs on top of eight lighting stands spread around the court. No truss and no arc, so the setup fits round a real court and goes up quickly. The cameras recorded in sync for the whole game and the footage went straight into Gracia’s pipeline.

The shot comes out almost in real time

4D Gaussian Splatting has been a post production job until now: the shoot wraps, the data goes off, and the finished scene comes back later. Here the game was reconstructed almost as it happened. The system also worked out the virtual flight path itself: a move through the play that stops on a frozen moment as the score goes in, then carries on. Nobody plotted a camera path for the clips on this page.

Why this matters for live events

The point of the system is the replay. A frozen, orbiting view of the moment the ball leaves the hand or a player leaves the floor, built from real footage of the real play, available almost at once rather than days later. The 16 cameras cover the whole court, so there is no choosing an angle in advance; the angle is chosen after the moment has happened. The same applies to any live event where one moment is the product: sport, music, product launches.

The Argus rig that captured this also covers bullet time, photogrammetry and static 3D Gaussian Splatting, so a static 3D scan of the venue or the players comes from the same cameras on the same day.