First in-person meeting with Matt Walsh
- Matt is one of our two SMEs (subject matter experts).
- He brought the 3-camera shoulder rig that his team built for us to try on.
The Narrative
- Our advisors John and Mo encouraged us to come up with 3 distinct narrative ideas by the end of the week. After a brainstorming session, we actually ended up falling in love with one idea:
- We were inspired by a video Hazel shared. The video is set in an office space, and the camera zooms into the desk, showing all sorts of objects, like a miniature helicopter throwing a life-sized phone into a life-sized coffee cup.
- Inspired by this video, we want to set our narrative in a supermarket. We’ll scan environments and objects, as well as play with scale.
- The reason we chose the supermarket is because it has distinct shapes, textures, and colors — all of which are helpful environmental qualities for doing a Gaussian Splat.
- A few things we want to explore using the 3D Gaussian Splatting technology:
- Camera movements
- Transitions between scenes
- Playing with the scale of things, such as making a big object miniature or making a small object gigantic.
The first draft of our narrative:
- Establishing shot of a supermarket.
- MCU: A human hand throws an apple into the air.
- MS: The apple lands on ice in the seafood section.
- Zooms into the ice to see a bird’s-eye view of a snowy CMU campus, zooms further in to see CMU’s “Walking to the sky” statue.
- Pan from the “Walking to the sky statue” to see Clayton house in the background.
- Pan to a nearby plant.
- There’s a car at the foot of the plant. Zoom to the back of the car.
- Camera is still while the car drives off camera. Reveals a tree next to the car.
- Zooms out to see that the tree is a small Bonsai tree. Zooms further out to see several pots of Bonsai trees.
- Pans to a life-size statue next to the pots. The statue is of a human holding an apple.
- Zooms into the statue apple, which morphs into the original apple in the supermarket.
Tech test
We’ve been performing some tech tests with an iPhone while waiting on our Insta360 X5 cameras. By controlling the lighting and using a low-texture background, we managed to get some amazing results. You can actually feel the fuzziness of the object. It looks just like a high-definition photo, but you can move around it in 3D.
Week 2: January 19-23, 2026