Splat Workshop

A graphical interface for the Arcturus Vision reconstruction pipeline: pick a recording from the Arcturus Vision Camera on your Steam Frame, check it, run the conversion and get the result straight into the Gaussian XR gallery on the headset. With a web interface, a tray icon and a recording check.

Deutsch

_{Example screenshot – the recording thumbnails are replaced by placeholder art.}

Rooms, a statue, your car, a garden – anything you can walk around with the camera can become a scene you step into.

Splat Workshop does not compute the splats itself: the reconstruction is done by the Arcturus Vision pipeline and Spirula Studio. Splat Workshop is the GUI around them – it prepares the inputs, starts and monitors the pipeline and takes care of everything before and after.

Arcturus Vision publishes the reconstruction scripts and a Spirula Studio fork, but turning a recording into a scene you can open in Gaussian XR means a lot of manual steps. Splat Workshop wraps the whole path in a local web interface:

1. Pick a recording directly from the Frame (over SSH) or from your PC, with thumbnails.
2. Check it before spending an hour on it: brightness, structure, fast pans and covered lenses, second by second.
3. Convert it with a quality preset (Fast / High / Maximum) or fine-tuned values, with live progress, ETA and a PSNR curve.
4. Put it in the gallery: preview image and name plate in the look of the bundled example scenes, copied into Gaussian XR's Scenes folder on the Frame.

Features

• Web interface (Python standard library only) – also from your phone or a second PC in your home network if you want.
• Tray icon – shows whether Splat Workshop is running and what it is doing (progress ring). Open, cancel a conversion, quit. Quitting during a conversion asks whether to let it finish in the background or cancel it.
• Conversions survive everything: they run as their own process; close the browser, quit the tray, restart – reopen Splat Workshop and you see the progress again.
• Cancel & resume: a cancelled conversion continues from its last saved state.
• Recording check without AI: plain per-second measurements with a colour-coded timeline and concrete hints (“0:45–0:59 little structure”). See What the check measures.
• Floor plans (experimental – so far tested with two rooms) of single scenes or several together – recordings from one session share the Frame's tracking frame, so rooms line up by themselves into a plan of your whole home. Two styles: Pretty (colour top view, walls, the path you walked) and Classic (glowing point density), plus a simple measuring tool (click points, get distances – about ±5 cm).
  
  _{Example home – synthetic data, drawn with the same renderer. Combining rooms relies on the Frame keeping its tracking frame between recordings; how well that holds for a whole home is still being tested.}
• Finished scenes: copy to the Frame later, re-copy, open the folder or open the scene in Spirula Studio.
• English and German interface (automatic, switchable). More languages welcome – see web/i18n.js and splat_workshop/i18n.py.

Requirements

• Linux with a GPU that runs Spirula Studio (Vulkan; tested on Nobara/Fedora with an NVIDIA RTX 4070 SUPER, 12 GB). Splat Workshop uses Linux desktop tools (xdg-open, notify-send, KDE/GNOME file dialogs). macOS is untested – the Arcturus pipeline runs there, Splat Workshop would need small changes. Windows is not supported, since Arcturus does not support its reconstruction scripts on Windows yet.
• A Steam Frame with the Arcturus Vision Camera – recordings are the *_stereo.mp4 files from the Arcturus camera app (two video tracks plus a calibration/pose track). Normal videos do not work.
• Python 3.11+, ffmpeg/ffprobe, uv, ssh, curl
• Node.js for splat-transform: npm install -g @playcanvas/splat-transform
• The Arcturus reconstruction scripts (av1-3dgs-pipeline) from arcturus.vision/apps – not included here, download them yourself.
• Spirula Studio, built from the Arcturus fork exactly as described in the pipeline's README (branch sfm-calibrated-manifest, Vulkan backend).
• Optional for the tray icon: PySide6 (sudo dnf install python3-pyside6 / sudo apt install python3-pyside6.qtwidgets) – otherwise uv fetches it on first start. On GNOME you need the AppIndicator extension to see tray icons.

Install

git clone https://github.com/thunderheronight/splat-workshop.git
cd splat-workshop
./install.sh --desktop            # menu entry + desktop shortcut; add --autostart for the tray at login

Then edit ~/.config/splat-workshop/config.toml:

[paths]
pipeline = "~/arcturus/av1-3dgs-pipeline"
spirula  = "~/arcturus/spirula-studio/build_vulkan/spirula"

[frame]
host = "steamos@192.168.1.50"     # your Frame's address

Splat Workshop shows what is still missing at the top of the page.

SSH access to the Frame

Downloading recordings and copying scenes uses SSH with a key:

1. On the Frame: Steam Settings → System → Enable Developer Mode.
2. In the left-hand menu, scroll down to Developer, and near the bottom of that page choose Set User Password. There is no default password – SSH works only after you set one. (Valve's docs)
3. Find the Frame's address: its IP is shown under Steam Settings → Internet (or in your router); the hostname can be set under Steam Settings → System → Hostname.
4. On your PC: ssh-copy-id steamos@<frame address> (enter the password once), then check that ssh steamos@<frame address> logs in without asking.
5. Give the Frame a fixed IP address in your router so it does not change, and put steamos@<that address> into [frame] host in the config.

Usage

Start Splat Workshop from the menu (or ./splat-workshop). The tray icon appears and the page opens in your browser.

Command
./splat-workshop	tray icon + open the page
./splat-workshop --background	tray icon only (autostart)
./splat-workshop --no-tray	without tray; the server stops itself after 20 idle minutes
./splat-workshop --server	server in the foreground
scripts/splat.sh <recording> "<name>"	convert on the command line (QUALITY=fast|high|max, NO_UPLOAD=1, --resume)
scripts/to-frame.sh <run> "<name>"	(re)copy a finished scene to the Frame

After copying, restart Gaussian XR on the Frame so the new scene appears in the gallery. A Steam “verify files” or app update can reset Gaussian XR's Scenes folder – Splat Workshop also keeps a copy in ~/Documents/GaussianSplats on the Frame, and Copy again restores a scene.

Access from other devices

Set lan = true in [server]. The page is then reachable at http://<pc address>:8771/ from your home network (only private network addresses are accepted, other websites cannot send commands to it). Actions that open windows on the PC (video player, folder, Spirula, file dialog) and quitting are only available on the PC itself. There is no login – only enable this in a network you trust.

Recording tips

• Light: daylight plus room lights indoors. Dark recordings get noisy and patchy.
• HDR, 30 fps in the camera app works best; the pipeline tone-maps HLG automatically. Don't use “Linear”.
• Rooms: 30–90 s each, walk slowly, turn slowly, look at things from several sides.
• Objects: walk around them in a slow circle (15–40 s) and keep them in the middle of the picture.
• Avoid pointing at bare walls, ceilings or tiles for long – there is nothing for the software to hold on to.
• Moving people or pets become ghostly smears.

What the check measures

Per second (from the keyframes of both cameras, about 5–15 s per recording):

brightness	very dark passages
edge strength (Sobel)	bare walls, ceilings, tiles, blur – where camera positions are hard to determine
difference to the previous second	fast pans
left vs. right camera	covered or smudged lens
almost white pixels, colour cast, length	hints

It is a measurement, not image recognition: it does not detect people or moving objects. The thresholds were calibrated on HLG recordings of the Arcturus camera; they are constants at the top of splat_workshop/check.py.

Quality presets

	image pairs	resolution	max. splats	steps	time*
Fast	100	½	1.5 M	30k	~10 min
High	5 per second (100–500)	full	2 M	30k	~35–50 min
Maximum	8 per second (100–500)	full	3 M	50k	~1.5 h+

* RTX 4070 SUPER. Spirula keeps training images on disk, so 12 GB of VRAM are enough for “High”. A run needs a few GB of free disk space.

Files

config:            ~/.config/splat-workshop/config.toml
recordings:        [paths] recordings   (downloaded from the Frame)
scenes:            [paths] runs/<name>/  (scene.sog, spirula/scene.ply, gallery files, intermediate data)
internal state:    next to runs/ in .splat-workshop/ (logs, thumbnails, check results)

Uninstall

./install.sh --uninstall removes the menu entry, icon and autostart. Your config and scenes stay.

Transparency note

This project was written with the help of AI: the code, the documentation and the example screenshot placeholders were created together with Claude (Opus 5.5) by Anthropic, using Claude Code. Ideas, testing on real hardware, decisions and review were done by me. Bug reports are welcome – if something looks off, it may well be a mistake neither of us noticed.

Credits & license

Splat Workshop is a community tool and not affiliated with Valve or Arcturus Vision. It uses the Arcturus Vision reconstruction scripts and their Spirula Studio fork, and PlayCanvas splat-transform – please follow their licenses and terms.

Splat Workshop itself is licensed under the GNU General Public License v3.0.