From Google Street View to Gaussian Splats
Why I’m Engineering the Preservation of Time
The potential of the spatial web became intensely personal for me on a quiet afternoon, far from any new AR headset or tech conference. It happened in my living room, next to my grandmother.
She grew up in Poland, but after settling in southwestern Germany, decades of age and limited mobility meant that a visit to her childhood home was impossible. One day, as we talked about old times, I joked that I would love to visit her old home with her, even if I had to carry her the 1,200 kilometers on my back. She enjoyed recounting her time growing up there, but deep down, we both knew a visit would never happen. I made some silly jokes to cheer her up, but the look on her face showed me how deeply she missed her home.
Then, I pulled up Google Street View, navigated to her old neighborhood, and found the house. She hadn’t seen it in thirty years.
The shock, the raw emotion on her face—just from a few flat pictures stitched together—was profound. For a brief, unexpected moment, the technological barrier of her wheelchair vanished. She was home.
That experience was my bittersweet “Aha” moment: Spatial Computing is the future of memory preservation.
To better demonstrate about how I imagine digital preservation you might want to check out this demo from xgrids: Bamboo Temple Japan
The Architect’s Fear: The Locked Archive
Inspired, I started experimenting. I used Matterport to document my grandfather’s house before it was sold after my other grandmother’s death. I have that archive now. A tangible digital space I can walk through to revisit my childhood memories.
But here is the engineering dilemma that keeps me focused on open source: The vendor lock-in. What happens if Matterport, Google, or any other proprietary platform decides to shift formats, raise prices, or, worst of all, simply go offline in ten years?
That archive of my grandfather’s house - the archive of my memories - is gone. We exchange the immobility of the body for the fragility of the server. My mission, therefore, is not just to build cool 3D spaces; it is to build resilient digital systems that ensure our memories outlive the companies that helped create them.
The Solution: A Decentralized, Open Format
This is where the engineering focus of The Digital Archive Mandate comes in. If we are to truly preserve our time, we must control the file format. This is why the xgrids decision to open-source the LCC (Layered Compression for Collections) format is such a game-changer.
• The Problem with Matterport: We rely on their proprietary API and format to access the memory.
• The Promise of LCC: It offers a highly compressed, efficient, and open-standard way to package massive point cloud data. You download it, you own the file, and you control its destiny. It ensures long-term preservation and accessibility, regardless of which company exists in 20 years. LCC is the anti-fragile format built for digital permanence.
The New Focus
Unfortunately, this clarity came too late for my grandmother’s house archive. But it is not too late for others. My commitment is now clear. I will continue to cover the entire AR spectrum, from Meta’s accessible hardware push to the engineering of Gaussian Splatting, but every article will be framed by this singular question: Does this technology serve the mission of creating resilient, human-centered digital archives? If you are a developer, an archivist, a designer, or just a person who cherishes memory, join me as we learn how to architect and implement the Spatial Archive of Time.
See you in the next one!