Splats
“Splats” – A cartoon illustrating why Apple’s latest image technology hasn’t made everyone thrilled about how easily photos can now become hyper-realistic videos.
Hollywood spends obscene amounts just to make visuals look real. A single blockbuster can shell out $100M+ on visual effects, with solo scenes costing $100,000 to $1M+ to render through traditional pipelines. Lighting, brightness matching, and color grading alone can consume 30–50% of a VFX budget because each tweak requires fresh rendering.
Apple’s new Sharp image technology uses a “splatting” representation that treats scenes as clouds of tiny soft blobs in 3D space. Each puff has position, size, color and transparency, and the view is constructed by blending them. This isn’t AI creating anything new, it’s the deeper evolution of compute itself, the payoff from years of investment in GPUs and silicon, with splats simply exposing how much visual work modern hardware can now do.
Splats change economics fast since they can produce usable high-fidelity scenes for effectively zero compute cost on consumer devices. That eliminates the bottleneck that has kept photorealism confined to big budgets.
In the words of Josh Kale, co-host on the Limitless podcast,, “Hollywood… is going to get completely run over by this… cutting costs down by like tens of millions of dollars.” Directors could iterate scenes in real time, small teams can prototype final visuals, and entire VFX departments may pivot roles.
Beyond films, splats have applicability to healthcare imaging, disaster site scanning, architectural capture, and immersive memory experiences where you step inside a photo rather than just view it. The era of heavyweight rendering is ending, replaced by compute that fits in your pocket.
