Insta360 cameras can now turn your videos into explorable 3D worlds

There’s a big difference between recording a place and actually being able to revisit it. A regular photo freezes one view. A video gives you a moving perspective. But what if you could capture an entire room, studio, exhibition, or favorite travel spot and later move around inside it from different angles?

That’s the idea behind Spatial Capture, a new feature now available on the Insta360 X6, X5, and X4 Air. It takes 360-degree video and turns it into an explorable 3D scene using a technology called 3D Gaussian Splatting, without requiring users to piece together footage from multiple cameras or learn specialized 3D software.

From 360 video to a 3D space

3D Gaussian Splatting, or 3DGS, has been gaining attention as a way to reconstruct real-world environments from photographs or video. The traditional process, however, can involve capturing a location from multiple angles and then running the footage through specialized software.

Spatial Capture is designed to take much of that complexity away. With the X6, users can simply record a 360-degree video of the space they want to preserve. Because the camera captures everything around it simultaneously, there’s no need to keep turning the camera toward different parts of a room or worry quite as much about overlooking an important angle.

The X6 footage is then processed through Insta360’s workflow and transformed into a 3D scene that you can actually explore. That distinction is important. You aren’t simply watching a video of the space. You can move around the resulting scene, change your perspective, and look at the environment from different positions.

Suddenly, that vacation rental, art studio, or childhood home becomes something you can virtually revisit rather than just another clip buried in your camera roll.

Your memories can become places

That opens up some surprisingly personal possibilities. Imagine capturing your home before moving to another city, documenting a studio before changing it, preserving a temporary exhibition, or recording a memorable travel destination while you’re actually there.

Creators could also use the feature for 3D storytelling, while small businesses and artists could capture stores, studios, galleries, and other physical spaces without investing in dedicated 3D capture equipment.

Insta360 cofounder and VP of marketing Max Richter says the goal is to make spatial creation accessible beyond people with specialized equipment or technical expertise. The X6’s ability to capture the entire environment in 360 degrees certainly makes it a natural fit for that idea.

It takes just a couple of minutes to capture

Using Spatial Capture is relatively straightforward. Record a 360 video of the space, with individual recordings limited to two minutes. If you shoot longer, you can trim the footage before processing.

From there, open the Insta360 app, select the video from the Spatial Capture section, and tap “Generate.” The processing happens in the cloud and typically takes around one to two hours. You don’t have to sit around watching a progress bar, either — you can close the app and wait for a notification when your scene is ready.

Once generated, the 3D scene can be explored using touch controls, a virtual joystick, or your phone’s gyroscope.

You can also add effects and create custom camera paths before exporting the result as a video. If you want people to explore the scene themselves, you can share an interactive link that works without requiring them to download an app or the original file.

A new reason to actually use 360 cameras

Perhaps the most interesting part is that Spatial Capture doesn’t require buying another specialized gadget to try it.

If you already own an X6, X5, or the X4 Air, the feature adds an entirely new use for a camera that was already capable of capturing every direction around you. And if you’ve been considering a 360-degree camera, this is the sort of software feature that could make the hardware feel considerably more capable over time.

Insta360 is also giving users a way to try the feature before committing to more extensive use: Spatial Capture allows up to four 3DGS scenes per month for free.

For travelers, creators, and anyone who enjoys documenting places, that’s enough to make the feature worth experimenting with, and perhaps enough to make your next 360 camera purchase a little more future-proof.

More: DJI Osmo 360 II gets better night video and cloud backups