Gaussian Splatting for Insurance Adjusters: A Plain Explanation
A phone walkthrough of a damaged kitchen goes in, and a photoreal scene anyone on the claim can walk from a link comes out. Gaussian splatting for insurance adjusters, explained without the maths.
Gaussian splatting is a way of turning ordinary video of a room into a photoreal 3D scene you can walk around on a screen. Gaussian splatting for insurance adjusters comes down to one thing in practice: you film the loss once, and everyone on the claim can revisit the room later, from any angle, without another site visit.
No new hardware. The capture is a slow walk with the phone in your pocket, and the output is a link.
No maths below. Just what you record, what comes back, and where it still falls short.
What is Gaussian splatting, in plain terms?
Gaussian splatting rebuilds a space from many overlapping video frames and stores it as millions of tiny, soft, coloured blobs, each placed where a surface was seen. On screen they blend into continuous walls and contents that look like the original footage, even from angles nobody filmed.
The technique was published in 2023 by researchers at INRIA and the Max Planck Institute (Kerbl et al., ACM Transactions on Graphics, 2023). It is young. It spread because the result looks like the real room rather than a grey model, and it plays back smoothly in a browser.
A splat is not a solid model with hard edges, and it is not a set of measured survey points. It is a record of how every surface looked, arranged in 3D. For the longer technical version, what a 3D Gaussian splat actually stores walks through it.
What goes in: the capture on site
The input is footage you can shoot today. Three kinds work:
- A phone walkthrough video. MP4 or MOV straight off the phone. Walk slowly and pass each wall at more than one height.
- 360 footage. A consumer 360 camera on a pole sees the whole room at once, which suits tight bathrooms and loft hatches. See 360 footage to 3D.
- Drone footage. For roofs, elevations and storm damage across a whole plot, a slow orbit reconstructs into one continuous scene.
Time on site is short. The guidance on the video to 3D page is usually a minute or two of footage for a room, and a few minutes more for a full floor or an exterior. You record while walking the loss, which you were doing anyway. Coverage matters more than length: a short clip that sees every wall beats a long one that lingers in a corner.
Move slower than feels natural and avoid fast pans. Motion blur is the one thing the reconstruction cannot recover, and the usual reason a first capture comes back soft.
What comes out: a photoreal scene behind a link
The footage is processed in the cloud. Captures Studio returns most scenes in 10 to 120 minutes, depending on how much footage went up and the level of detail requested. No GPU on your laptop, nothing to install, and you are notified when it is ready.
What you get back is a link. Open it on a phone, tablet or desktop and the room loads in the browser with no app. It can also go out as an embed or a QR code. Underneath, the scene is a splat file such as .spz or .ply, the formats covered in the guide to Gaussian splat file formats.
A reviewer drags to look around and stops wherever they like. The ceiling stain you filmed in passing can be inspected from directly below. That is the practical shift from phone video to 3D: a clip that plays one way becomes a space the desk adjuster or contractor explores on their own terms.
How is a splat different from photos, a 360 tour or a point cloud?
A photo set shows what the adjuster chose to point at. A 360 tour shows everything, but only from the spots where the camera stood. A point cloud is measured, but reads as a diagram outside a survey team.
| Photo set | 360 tour | Point cloud | Gaussian splat | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| What you see | Framed stills | Full panoramas from fixed spots | Coloured dots in 3D | A continuous photoreal room |
| Move freely between views | No | Jump between capture points | Yes, but sparse up close | Yes |
| Angles nobody shot | None | None between stops | Partial | Yes, within what the footage covered |
| Readable by a policyholder | Yes | Yes | Rarely | Yes |
| Measure in it | No | Limited | Yes, with survey kit | Yes, once scaled to a reference |
| Typical capture kit | Phone | 360 camera on a tripod | Laser scanner | Phone, 360 camera or drone |
The splat does not replace the photo file. Close-ups of a serial plate or a moisture reading still belong on the claim. What it fills is the gap between those stills, the context usually rebuilt from memory when someone asks a question weeks later.
Can you measure inside the scene?
Yes, once the scene is scaled. A splat from phone video has the right shape but no sense of size, so you give it one: pick something in the capture whose real length you know, such as a tape measure laid on the floor, a standard door, or a marker, and set its length. The whole scene scales to match.
From then on, distances can be measured directly in 3D space inside the scene. Ceiling height, the width of a stained section of plasterboard, the run of a damaged worktop. A desk reviewer reads the dimension off the capture instead of asking someone to drive back with a tape.
Precision depends on the reference and on how well the footage covered the surface, and no tolerance figure has been published. Treat it as a working dimension, and measure anything likely to be contested by hand on site.
Where Gaussian splatting for insurance adjusters holds up
The strongest case is any claim where the record has to outlive the visit. A dated 3D scan of property damage holds the room as it stood that day, before strip-out, drying or repairs change it. A dispute months later still has the pre-repair room to look at.
Long claims make that more valuable. J.D. Power's 2025 U.S. Property Claims Satisfaction Study put the average homeowners repair cycle at 32.4 days, the longest since the study began in 2008. Over a month, the claim passes between several people. A photoreal 3D record gives each of them the same room, not a folder of someone else's framing choices.
It also suits desk adjusting: a policyholder or contractor films the walkthrough and the reviewer looks for themselves. The piece on remote site inspection with 3D capture covers that workflow in more depth, and Multi Splat lines up two captures of the same room so before and after can be compared side by side.
Where it falls down
The limits of Gaussian splatting for insurance adjusters are fundamental, not teething problems.
It records surfaces, not what is behind them. Moisture inside a cavity wall, a cracked joist under carpet, or mould behind a unit will not appear unless it is visible on camera.
Mirrors, glass and standing water confuse it. A bathroom with a large mirror, or a flooded floor reflecting the ceiling, comes back with soft or doubled patches where the reflection sits. Bare white walls can turn vague too.
Darkness and movement hurt it. A property with the power off, lit by a torch, gives uneven light to work from, and a person walking through frame leaves a smear.
And a splat is not a CAD model. Estimating software still needs its own wall areas and floor plan.
Your first capture on a claim
A first attempt at Gaussian splatting for insurance adjusters should be one room you would have photographed anyway. Switch the lights on and open the curtains. Clear people out of the room, then walk the perimeter slowly at chest height with the phone held level. Do a second lap lower down, and a third angled up at the ceiling if the damage is overhead.
Before you start, put a tape measure on the floor, extended to a known length, somewhere the camera will see it clearly. That step is what makes the scene measurable.
Upload the clip before you leave. If the scene is ready while you are still nearby, open it on your phone; a soft wall can be filmed again in two minutes rather than on a second visit.
FAQ
Can I measure in a Gaussian splat?
Yes, after scaling. Include something of known length in the footage, such as a tape measure or a standard door, and set that length in the scene. Distances can then be measured directly in 3D. Precision depends on the reference and the capture quality, so verify any contested dimension by hand on site.
How long does a Gaussian splat take to process?
With Captures Studio, most scenes are ready in 10 to 120 minutes after upload, depending on how much footage you send and the level of detail requested. You are notified when it finishes, so the tab can be closed meanwhile.
Does the policyholder need an app to view the scene?
No. The scene opens from a link in an ordinary web browser on a phone, tablet or desktop. It can also be shared as an embed or a QR code. Nobody on the claim, policyholder, contractor or reviewer, has to install anything to look around.
Is a Gaussian splat the same as a 360 virtual tour?
No. A 360 tour shows panoramas from the fixed points where the camera stood, and you jump between them. A Gaussian splat is a continuous 3D reconstruction, so a viewer can move anywhere the footage covered and look at angles that were never filmed directly, such as the underside of a damaged shelf.
Can a Gaussian splat show hidden damage?
No. It reconstructs what the camera saw, so damage behind plasterboard, under flooring or inside a cavity will not appear. It works as a visual record of surfaces and visible condition. Moisture readings, thermal images and intrusive inspection still need their own tools, and their results attach to the claim alongside the scene.
A Gaussian splat is a phone walkthrough turned into a room that anyone on the claim can stand in later. It will not see through a wall or replace the estimate, but it will answer the question nobody thought to ask on the day, from the angle nobody thought to photograph.