Demystifying Spatial Media Formats: From Point Clouds to Neural Fields

Volumetric video is essentially the art of capturing 3D movement over time, think of it as filming a performance in a way that you can later walk around it. Instead of watching shadows on a wall, as in traditional flat video, we’re capturing the entire sculpture in motion, with depth and volume. In practice, volumetric capture uses many cameras to record a subject from all angles, then reconstructs a full 3D video of that subject. The result is video you can experience from any viewpoint, as if you’re in the scene rather than looking through a window.

Why do volumetric formats matter so much? The way this 3D data is represented affects everything – file size, visual quality, how easily you can edit or stream it, and the latency or speed of playback. Early approaches produced huge files that were hard to manage, but preserved detail; newer approaches aim to shrink data and speed up rendering, sometimes at the cost of certain details. Choosing the right format is a balancing act between fidelity and practicality. For instance, a format that stores every tiny detail might look great but be too heavy to use live, whereas a more efficient format might stream in real-time but with some loss of texture. Understanding the evolution from point clouds and meshes to neural fields will shed light on how we arrived at today’s solutions – and why a new generation of spatial media is unlocking truly scalable 3D video.

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