Restoring Half a Century of Memories with 3D Gaussian Splatting: How They Preserved an Old Photo Studio | Linear Portfolio

Deep down, everyone probably harbors a space loaded with memories that can't quite be held onto. But as technology evolves, it's opening up new possibilities for how we store those memories.

Recently, an engineer at Manycore Tech — a Linear Capital angel portfolio company — teamed up with colleagues to use 3D Gaussian splatting to recreate an old photo studio that has carried half a century of neighborhood memories.

As an early-stage investment firm focused on frontier technology, Linear Capital has always believed that technological progress is meant to make life better. We're sharing this warm story of farewell, preservation, and digital rebirth with you.

Do you have a space you can't hold onto? Maybe it's the alley where you played with friends as a child, the old street in your hometown that got demolished, the campus library that was renovated... It holds memories that belong to you alone.

Have you ever wondered, if only there were a way to preserve these places permanently, to even revisit them from time to time?

To preserve one grandfather's half-century of memories, an engineer at Manycore Tech named A Hang did something pretty cool. Behind it lies a warm story of farewell, preservation, and digital rebirth:

In Sandun Township, on the north side of Hangzhou, beneath the phoenix trees west of Chenjia Bridge, a retro-style photo studio that had gone viral online was about to bid farewell to its keeper of several decades — Grandpa Ahu.

This small studio Grandpa ran held more than just photographs — it contained the laughter and stories of neighbors spanning half a century.

Due to health reasons, Grandpa Ahu could no longer keep the shop running. How could the memories behind those photos be passed on?

A Hang is a 3D engineer at Manycore Tech.

He came across Grandpa Ahu's story online and wanted to try using the latest AI technology to "restore" the studio, to help Grandpa preserve this memory and keep it alive in a three-dimensional virtual world.

When the Manycore Tech team heard about it, they wanted to join in too.

And so A Hang and his teammates quickly assembled a full-function "gift squad" spanning modeling to development, creating this "3D Gaussian recreation of the photo studio" — a complete, faithful "copy" of the entire shop in virtual space.

3D Gaussian splatting is an AI-based 3D reconstruction technology that can restore real-world objects or scenes into the digital realm with extremely high precision. (For example, provide a scanned video and it can be reconstructed into a 3D scene.) No professional equipment needed — just a phone camera — and you can build an immersive 3D digital environment.

For technical professionals, unlike traditional rendering methods like ray tracing that use geometric meshes, 3D Gaussian splatting employs countless elliptical point clouds for visual expression. Compared to conventional 3D modeling, it's faster, lighter, more realistic, accessible to ordinary people, and has minimal hardware requirements.

For everyone else, the biggest difference from ordinary video is that video only lets you watch from a fixed perspective — look but don't touch. With a 3D Gaussian reconstructed space, you can freely switch viewpoints as if you're actually there, roaming immersively from any angle, sensing every detail, light, and atmosphere in the space.

In this studio restoration, it helped A Hang and his teammates:

• "Preserve" the old photo studio exactly as it was,
• Retain the details, atmosphere, and lighting of the space
• Generate a shareable digital link for online roaming, open to anyone

When the 3D Gaussian technology assembled countless tiny points of light from the video like building blocks, an identical photo studio had been fully reconstructed in the digital world. It completely documented every corner of the original studio, every piece of equipment, and every ray of light streaming through the skylight.

Meaningful acts, once done, tend to echo back. After the digital studio launched, messages and comments poured in from across the country:

• "My baby photo was taken here!"
• "My middle school ID photo, my work headshot, my wedding photo — Grandpa Ahu took them all."
• "My parents' young portraits were taken here. Thank you for preserving their youth."
• "This photo studio is our family's image museum."

Receiving this feedback, warmth flowed through A Hang and his friends. He said: In the past, photo studios preserved life's imprints through 2D images like photos and videos. As 3D Gaussian and AI technologies mature, we have the opportunity to record this world in three-dimensional, immersive ways. "I truly hope technology can help more people hold onto their own lost fragments of beauty."