Insta360 X6 turns 360 clips into explorable 3D scenes
Spatial Capture rebuilds a room from a two-minute 360 video using 3D Gaussian splatting, and the update also reaches the older X5 and X4 Air.
Insta360 has put a date on American availability for Spatial Capture, the feature that rebuilds a space from 360-degree footage. It arrives on 28 September for the Insta360 X6, and for the two generations behind it, the X5 and the X4 Air.
What Spatial Capture does
Insta360's own product page describes Spatial Capture as capturing objects or rooms in 360 degrees and importing that footage into the Insta360 app, where it is turned into a 3D Gaussian-splatting model.
In use it is deliberately undemanding. You record a clip of up to two minutes, trim it if it runs long, choose the footage on the Spatial Capture tab and tap Generate. The reconstruction happens in the cloud and takes roughly one to two hours, so the phone can be put away until a notification says the scene is ready.
Finished scenes are explored with touch controls, a virtual joystick or the handset's gyroscope, and you can set custom camera paths or add effects before exporting the result as a video or sharing it as an interactive link.
No rig required
Gaussian splatting has generally meant photographing a space methodically from many angles and processing the result in desktop software. A 360 camera sidesteps that, because it captures every direction as you simply walk through the room.
There are caveats worth knowing before the update lands. Reconstruction runs in Insta360's cloud, the terms for it reserve the right to adjust monthly processing quotas, and shared links can be set to expire. Insta360 has not published a price for the feature itself.
The hardware underneath
The X6 records 8K 360 video and 120-megapixel 360 photos from two square sensors, weighs 196 grams and is waterproof to 20 metres without a housing. Backdating the feature to the X5 and X4 Air means owners of those cameras get the same pipeline without buying new hardware.
The rollout lines up with the company's first North American flagship store, which has opened in Times Square in New York.
Our opinion
Insta360 is selling a workflow here rather than a camera, and that is the canny part: the hardest step in Gaussian splatting has always been the capture, and a 360 sensor does it as a side effect of walking into a room. The backport to the X5 and X4 Air is the detail that will matter most to existing owners, since it turns a paid upgrade into a software promise. Cloud processing, expiring links and an unpublished price are the counterweight, and quota terms are the kind of thing that quietly change after launch. If those stay reasonable, the feature turns a shelf of 360 footage into something people can actually revisit.