Welcome to the Prop Media podcast with your hosts Matty and Moses, the founders of Pixlmob and propmedia.com. In this episode, they are live from the PME conference in Vegas and are joined by Navjeet Chhina, one of the co-founders of Nucleus 4D.

The hosts and Navjeet discuss Nucleus 4D's cutting-edge technology, Gaussian splatting, which is poised to revolutionize the property media space. Navjeet, who has a background in land development, architectural rendering, 3D, and visualization, explains that he started Nucleus 4D with his top engineers from his previous 3D innovation studio. His previous work in creating photoreal digital twins was time-consuming and expensive, sometimes taking six to eight months and costing hundreds of thousands of dollars to build just one location, requiring cloud streaming that cost $2 per user hour.

Nucleus 4D uses an AI neural rendering technique called Gaussian splatting to take photos and images of the real world and create a photoreal 3D twin. This process reduces the cost and time of creating a photoreal digital twin by 95–97%. This technology allows users to truly walk around and explore a 3D scene in photoreal quality, like a video game. Unlike technologies like Matterport, users are not anchored to nodes or hopping between 360 bubbles/panoramic photos.

Navjeet shares how the technology accurately replicates real-life reflections, lighting, textures, and shadows. He also discusses the potential for adding 3D objects and assets into the spaces via an editor, leading to the idea of “Fortnite open houses”. The technology is significant for real estate media because it allows all deliverables (3D tours, cinematic videos, measurements, floor plans, and photos in the future) to be extracted from a single scan. This efficiency allows media companies to spend 45 minutes to an hour on-site and get all their deliverables, increasing their profitability.

The episode also covers:

• The power of virtual cameras for infinitely remixing and outputting videos and photos from one capture session.
• The "Live Guided Tour" feature, which allows realtors and up to ten clients to meet inside the virtual space via a Zoom-like meeting.
• Future features, including dynamic lighting, the ability to program the time of day, and geopositioning for the space.
• The recommended hardware for capturing Nucleus 4D tours is the $5,000 Portal Cam by XGrids, which allows a 3,000 sq ft home to be scanned in about 45 minutes.
• The business model, which charges three cents a square foot per listing per year, including the live guided tour feature, and the CMS system for managing realtor accounts.
• The legal question of whether unlicensed individuals could conduct virtual showings.
• How Nucleus 4D fits into the future of AR/VR, where the underlying data collected is valuable for augmented reality applications.
• Current turnaround time expectations, which are 48 to 72 hours for most deliverables.

Navjeet emphasizes that the technology is just at the tip of the iceberg, and advances are being driven by major companies like Google, Nvidia, and Meta, which will benefit real estate applications.