How Do You Make a Walkable 3D Listing Tour With a 360 Camera?

For years, a walkable 3D tour meant a dedicated scanning camera like Matterport and a monthly plan. Now a consumer 360 camera and free software can produce a 3D walkthrough that looks more like your photos than a scan. The catch is that the process is still rough around the edges. This is the workflow that works, plus the spots where it goes wrong.

What is Gaussian splatting, and why does it matter for listings?

Gaussian splatting builds a 3D scene from ordinary photos or video. Software works out where the camera was for every frame, then fills the space with millions of small, soft, colored blobs (the "splats") and adjusts them until the scene matches what the camera saw from every angle. The result renders in a web browser in real time, and a buyer can move anywhere in it, not just hop between fixed scan points. Because it is built from real images, it keeps reflections, texture, and light the way a photo does. Zillow already uses splats for SkyTour, its drone-based exterior view. Interiors are where photographers can put it to work.

What gear do you need?

• A 360 camera. The Insta360 X4 and X5 class is what most people use; the X5 lists at about $550. Every frame sees the whole room, so one slow walk covers far more than a phone can.
• The invisible selfie stick that comes with the camera, extended to about two-thirds of its length indoors.
• A computer with a real GPU if you train locally. An NVIDIA card with 8 GB of VRAM is a comfortable baseline. Cloud apps skip this, for a fee.
• Or just a phone, for a room or two. Scaniverse trains splats on the phone for free, and Polycam captures splats too. A whole house is much easier with a 360 camera.

How should you capture the house?

Your first choice is video or interval photos. Video is faster on site: about 15 to 30 minutes for a typical home. The tradeoff is lower resolution per frame and a real risk of motion blur. Interval photos give sharper, higher-resolution frames, but you stop for each one, so a house can take hours. Most people start with video. Niantic's 360 guide for Scaniverse recommends 8K at 30 fps, H.265, high bitrate, and indoors a fixed 1/500 shutter with auto ISO to freeze motion.

Then shoot it like you mean it:

• Walk slower than feels natural. Fast movement causes blur, and blur becomes floaters. Crawl through dark rooms.
• Lock your exposure and white balance. Frames that shift brightness confuse the trainer.
• Turn every light on before you start, and do not touch them again. Turn off ceiling fans and TVs, since anything that moves turns to mush.
• Weave and loop instead of walking a straight line, stay at least a foot from walls, and give doorways, stairs, and hallways extra coverage before, during, and after you pass through.
• Mask yourself out. A 360 camera sees you. Keep the stick steady and your body in the same place relative to the lenses. Then use the trainer's masking (Spirula Studio has AI masking built in) or delete what is left in cleanup.
• Watch mirrors and glass. Reflections do not behave like solid surfaces. Keep solid texture in frame, never stand still in a mirror's view, and expect big glass walls to need cleanup.

Before you leave, scrub the footage and check the hardest doorway, the darkest corner, and the most reflective room. Reshooting now is cheaper than coming back.

How do you deal with blown-out windows?

This is the problem that ruins most interior splats. Unlike your HDR stills, a single pass has one exposure, so if you expose for the room, windows go pure white. If you expose for the windows, the room goes dark. Start with the low-tech fixes: shoot when the inside and outside brightness are closer, like an overcast day or away from direct sun, and draw sheers in rooms where the view does not matter.

When the range is still too wide, some photographers try a second pass: walk the house once with exposure locked for the interior, then shoot the bright zones (window walls, a sunroom) as their own short pass with a darker locked exposure. Whether your trainer can combine passes shot at different exposures cleanly depends on the tool, and it is still hit or miss, so test it on one room before you rely on it for a listing.

Which software turns the capture into a splat?

• Spirula Studio: free and open source (GPLv3). It runs on NVIDIA, AMD, Intel, and Apple GPUs, reads 360 footage natively, and handles the camera solve itself. One person maintains it, and it changes fast.
• Postshot: a polished Windows trainer that needs an NVIDIA RTX-class GPU. Commercial use requires the paid Indie license.
• Polycam: phone and cloud capture on a monthly plan. It is the easiest option if you do not want to manage a GPU.
• Scaniverse: free on-device splats from a phone. Uploading 360 video for processing is on its paid web plans.

Be realistic about time. A house usually takes tens of minutes to a few hours on a good GPU, and it can run overnight or longer on older hardware. That is time you are not editing photos, so price it in.

How do you clean it up and export a .sog that works on phones?

Open the trained file in the free SuperSplat editor, which runs in your browser. Crop away everything outside the walls, then use the brush, lasso, and box selection tools to delete floaters, your own ghost, and the neighbor's yard if it does not help sell the house. Then export as SOG. SOG is a compressed format that is a small fraction of the size of a raw PLY: PlayCanvas cites a 4-million-splat scene going from about 1 GB to 42 MB. SOG export needs a WebGPU-capable browser such as current Chrome, Edge, or Safari.

Size matters because buyers often open MLS links on their phones. Aim for under about 5 million splats, roughly 50 MB. If your trainer lets you cap the splat count, set the cap there. If not, cut what buyers do not need in SuperSplat before you export.

How do you deliver the 3D walkthrough to the agent and the MLS?

The 3D walkthrough rides on top of a normal photo tour, so the photos still lead. On PFRE Tour, you upload the .sog file to the listing's tour and add 3D for $15 per tour. It then shows in three places:

• Inside the branded tour, alongside your photos, for the agent's website, email, and social posts
• On the unbranded MLS version of the tour, with no photographer or agent branding
• At a full-screen unbranded 3D link made for the MLS virtual tour field

On phones, buyers see a preview and tap to load the 3D, so it never slows down the photo tour. The strict photos-only MLS version leaves 3D out entirely for boards that allow nothing else. Most third-party 3D viewers carry a creator credit or links back to the host, which is exactly what MLS rules forbid; our guide to branded vs. unbranded tour links explains why. If you are still deciding whether to offer 3D at all, read Matterport vs. a 360 camera and Gaussian splats first.

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