Postcard is a short playable technical demo where you walk around photorealistic 3D scans of real world places.
Each environment in the game has been captured from the real world including its lighting, ambient sounds, and even the crunches of gravel and steps on concrete were recorded from the real location.
There's not a lot to actually do in the game, but if you love pretty environments and want a hands-on peek at how scanning tech can make something far more immersive than a 360-degree video, then you might enjoy Postcard.
Where are these places?
The places you can currently visit in Postcard are in Canberra, Australia.
We might be able to add some other locations in if there's interest :)
What can you do in the game?
Choose from a list of 10 different characters, then choose from a list of 7 locations.
Once you're in the location, you can walk, run, jump, and orbit the camera around. That's it. Nothing crazy on the controls or features, but some very stunning real-time visuals and reality capture going on.
Underlying technology
For the people who love behind the scenes tech details, the environments in Postcard are created from a mixture of traditional photogrammetry and mesh construction for the terrain shapes and shadow catching, as well as gaussian splats for the beautiful visual layer.
About 15-30 minutes of continuous video of each location capturing as many angles and details as possible, then processing through mesh photogrammetry and gaussian splatting, plus a lot of manual alignment and turning into playable areas. Shadow areas are hand-masked to avoid casting a second shadow over what was already present and baked in from the source scan. Spherical HDR photography in the middle of the scene for lighting, as well as walking and running on all the surfaces on site with a microphone near our shoes!
Handmade, no Gen AI.
