SpAItial's Echo-3 turns phone scans into metric 3D worlds

SpAItial's Echo-3 turns a short iPhone walk-through into a 3D world you can move through and measure.

SpAItial announced Echo-3 and its companion capture app in a blog post dated October 26, 2026; co-founder and CEO Matthias Niessner posted the launch on X the next day, and Spatial Insider dated the announcement October 27.

Echo-3 rebuilds a real space from phone video. It keeps what the camera saw, fills in the surfaces it missed so they match the surroundings, and returns geometry at real-world scale, so distances inside the reconstruction match the physical room. The model covers a single room, multi-floor buildings and outdoor spaces.

Echo-3 is SpAItial's latest "physically grounded world model," a class of model the company says works directly in 3D space rather than predicting frames the way a video generator does. SpAItial launched in May 2025 with a $13 million seed round led by Earlybird Venture Capital, per its founding post. Its founders include Niessner, a professor at TU Munich and a Synthesia co-founder, and Luke Rogers, previously at McKinsey.

The previous model, Echo-2, shipped on April 27, 2026, and generated 3D worlds from a text prompt or a single image. SpAItial reported that Echo-2 scored 74.7 on the WorldScore benchmark, ahead of World Labs' Marble-1.1 at 69.8. Echo-3 adds real-space capture and metric geometry.

In a post on its LinkedIn page, SpAItial listed the export formats as SPZ, SOG, meshes, normals and depth, for visualization, simulation, VFX and robotics. Niessner's launch post put the outputs as photorealistic Gaussian splats, point clouds and meshes at metric scale.

Creating a world uses 300 credits per recorded scan minute, per the App Store listing. The Standard plan includes 7,500 credits a month, which at that rate covers 25 scan minutes for non-commercial work; Pro includes 15,000 credits, or 50 minutes, with commercial rights. On the UK App Store, Standard is listed at £49.99 a month and Pro at £99.99.

SpAItial compared Echo-3 against the capture apps Polycam, KIRI Engine and Niantic Scaniverse on the same scene and says its reconstruction produced sharp surfaces without the stray floating fragments the others showed. No independent benchmark of Echo-3 has been published yet.

For creators, the metric scale and the mesh and depth exports matter more than the pretty splat: those are the formats a game engine, a VFX pipeline or a virtual-production stage can take. The enterprise page lists media, film and virtual production among the industries it works with. AGTP's write-up on X put a typical capture at about five to ten minutes on an iPhone, a figure the maker's own pages do not give.

The SpAItial app is free on the App Store for iPhone with iOS 18 or later, with a one-month free trial on eligible new subscriptions; Android is listed as coming soon, and enterprise teams can request Echo-3 through the API at spaitial.ai/enterprise.