4DV.ai
4DV.ai builds 4D video creation, playback and editing tools based on 4D Gaussian Splatting. Its browser player lets viewers move freely around a moving scene, and its work won SIGGRAPH 2025 Real-Time Live! Best in Show.
What is 4DV.ai?
4DV.ai is a Chinese team building an end-to-end chain for 4D video: capture, reconstruction, playback and editing, all resting on a technique called 4D Gaussian Splatting. Where a conventional clip fixes the camera once and for all, a 4D scene keeps its geometry, and the splats that describe the subject move through time. The viewer can therefore walk around a performance while it plays instead of watching it from the single angle a director chose. The company frames this as taking images out of the flat plane and turning them into an explorable, interactive space, and it names cinema and television, music, fashion, advertising and live sport as the fields it is aiming at.
What a visitor can actually touch today is the player. The home page embeds a live 4D scene rendered by a WebGL application served from the company's own front-end infrastructure, and a standalone player also answers at /viewer. Nothing is installed and no account is created. Inside that player sit frame-by-frame stepping, variable playback speed, splat size control, a full-screen mode, an album panel grouping several scenes, a quality setting, a download action, password-protected access and an XR mode; the site's own keywords name Apple Vision Pro, Meta Quest and PICO. The company claims its 4D output stays light enough to be browsed and shared on a phone.
Credibility here rests on peer recognition rather than on marketing. 4DV.ai took Best in Show in the Real-Time Live! session at SIGGRAPH 2025 with a demonstration covering the whole workflow from capture through reconstruction to artistic creation, and its about page notes it is the first Chinese team to win that award. The company also co-organised the SIGGRAPH Asia 2025 workshop on volumetric video with Zhejiang University and Shenzhen University, released a sixty-view dataset for a two-track challenge on compression and sparse-view reconstruction, and used FreeTimeGS, published by the zju3dv laboratory, as its baseline.
The site itself stays deliberately thin: two pages in the sitemap, no pricing, no account, no documented public API and no legal documents. Commercial contact runs through a business-cooperation form, a Discord server and contact@4dv.ai.
What it does
- Play a 4D video in a browser, with no plugin and no installation
- Move the viewpoint freely while the scene keeps playing
- Reconstruct a moving scene from a synchronised multi-camera capture using 4D Gaussian Splatting
- Edit and optimise 4D Gaussian scenes
- Deliver compressed 4D scenes light enough to browse on a phone
- Switch to an XR mode on a compatible headset
- Share a scene by URL, with password-protected access when needed
When to use 4DV.ai / When not to
A quick filter to help you decide if 4DV.ai is the right fit.
When to use 4DV.ai
- Film and television production teams looking for volumetric capture that keeps a scene explorable after the shoot
- Advertising and brand creatives who want an interactive asset rather than a fixed two-dimensional cut
- Music, fashion and live sport producers who want performances a viewer can walk around
- XR and immersive experience developers targeting Apple Vision Pro, Meta Quest or PICO headsets
- Computer vision researchers working on 4D reconstruction, compression or sparse-view synthesis
When not to use 4DV.ai
- Individuals hoping to turn a single phone video into 4D, since capture relies on a synchronised multi-camera rig
- Teams that need self-service sign-up and published pricing before they can start
- Buyers in regulated environments who require terms, a privacy policy and explicit GDPR commitments
- Developers looking for a documented public API to embed 4D playback in their own product
- Anyone who needs a mobile application, as there is no iOS or Android release
How to use 4DV.ai
A typical end-to-end flow, from setup to results.
- Open 4dv.ai: a 4D demonstration scene loads straight into the page
- Drag or rotate to change your viewpoint while the scene keeps playing
- Scroll or pinch to move closer to the subject
- Use the playback controls to step frame by frame or change speed
- Switch to full screen for a larger view
- Enter XR mode from a WebXR-capable headset
- Open /viewer for the standalone player, where a scene opens by its URL identifier
- Switch the interface between English and Simplified Chinese from the footer selector
- Read the about page for the company's mission and its SIGGRAPH award
- Fill in the business-cooperation form linked in the footer to discuss a project
Pros & Cons
Pros
- A working interactive demonstration on the home page, with no account required
- Peer recognition: Best in Show at SIGGRAPH 2025 Real-Time Live!
- Verifiable academic grounding, including a SIGGRAPH Asia 2025 workshop co-organised with Zhejiang University
- A genuine step beyond flat video, since the scene stays explorable after capture
- Playback in a plain browser, with XR support and no plugin
- Compression claimed to keep 4D scenes viewable on mobile
- A sixty-view dataset released to the research community
Cons
- No self-service offer: no sign-up, no published pricing, no trial
- No terms of service, no privacy policy and no GDPR mention anywhere
- No postal address and no full legal company name published
- A two-page site whose about section is served in Chinese even under the /en prefix
- No documented public API
- No mobile application and no app store presence
- 4D capture needs a multi-camera rig, so nothing lets an individual produce a scene alone
Pricing & Plans
No pricing is published. The /pricing path returns a 404 and the sitemap declares only two pages, so no plan, amount or currency is available. The 4D demonstrations and the browser player can be viewed without an account and without payment. Commercial engagement runs through a business-cooperation form linked from the footer.
Data, GDPR & hosting
A consolidated view of how 4DV.ai handles your data.
GDPR overview
The site never mentions the GDPR, neither to claim compliance nor to deny it. Across every page collected there is no privacy policy, no cookie notice, no data protection officer, no Article 27 representative and no privacy or DPO address; the only address published anywhere on the domain is contact@4dv.ai. The player nevertheless loads Google Analytics with no consent mechanism visible in the served HTML, and no processing jurisdiction is declared. For a European visitor this is a complete absence of information rather than a stated position: lawful basis, retention, rights of access and erasure, and transfers outside the European Union are addressed nowhere on the site.
Who owns the data?
Nothing on the site defines who owns what. 4DV.ai publishes no terms of service and no privacy policy: /terms, /legal, /privacy and /privacy-policy all return 404, and no such page has ever been archived for this domain. Searching the collected material for data processing agreements, sub-processors or retention rules returns nothing at all. The only ownership rule found anywhere on the domain concerns the multi-view dataset released for the SIGGRAPH Asia 2025 challenge, which is marked for research use only. Anyone planning a commercial project should expect ownership, licensing and reuse of the resulting 4D scenes to be settled in a private contract rather than by any published document.
Reuse rights
No terms of service exist, so nothing states what an end user may do with the scenes played on the site. The 4D demonstrations carry no visible licence, and the player exposes a download action and a password-protected access mode without any published conditions attached to either. The single explicit restriction anywhere on the domain applies to the multi-view research dataset distributed for the SIGGRAPH Asia 2025 challenge, which the workshop page limits to research use. In practice, reuse of anything produced or displayed by 4DV.ai has to be negotiated directly with the company.
Data retention & training
Hosting summary
4DV.ai publishes nothing about where data is hosted. The domain resolves to 104.21.44.237, an anycast address belonging to Cloudflare (AS13335); that is a content-delivery node, not a storage location, and it says nothing about the jurisdiction in which scenes or customer material are actually kept. The player is served from frontend.4dv.ai, with some assets on frontend.4dv-intelligence.com, and its JavaScript bundle references further internal endpoints at pd.4dv.ai and s1.4dv.ai. The submission system used for the SIGGRAPH Asia workshop runs on research.4dv.ai. None of this tells a visitor which country, region or provider ultimately holds the data, and no privacy policy or trust page exists to fill the gap. Anyone with a data residency requirement will have to obtain that information directly from the company.
Things to keep in mind
Risks and trade-offs to weigh before adopting 4DV.ai.
- With no terms and no privacy policy, nothing frames the use of the service or the handling of data
- No GDPR mention, no Article 27 representative and no data protection officer
- The player loads Google Analytics with no visible consent mechanism
- Neither the hosting location nor the processing jurisdiction is declared
- Volumetric capture of a person is biometric data in practice, and the site says nothing about the consent of the people filmed
- Ownership of the resulting 4D scenes is settled by no published document
- A minimal, fast-moving site: information can change without any public history
Setup & Integrations
Technical difficulty
Two very different answers. Watching costs nothing: the home page loads an interactive 4D scene by itself, with no account, no plugin and no installation, and a recent browser with a workable GPU is enough for smooth WebGL rendering. Producing a scene is another matter. 4D capture relies on a synchronised multi-camera rig, and the dataset released for the company's own challenge was shot with sixty views. No self-service import path is exposed anywhere on the site, so creating 4D content means working with 4DV.ai directly.
Deployment
Supported languages
Behind 4DV.ai
Resources
All the official URLs gathered for verification and reference.
Frequently asked questions
What is 4D video as 4DV.ai defines it?
Do I need to install anything to watch a 4D scene?
How much does 4DV.ai cost?
Can I try it without creating an account?
Is there an API?
Can 4D scenes be viewed in a headset?
Which languages does the site support?
What does the site say about personal data and the GDPR?
Has the technology been recognised outside the company?
Is the research dataset available?
Should you pick 4DV.ai?
4DV.ai is a rare case where the technology is clearly ahead of the commercial packaging. The 4D Gaussian Splatting work is real and independently recognised: Best in Show at SIGGRAPH 2025 Real-Time Live!, a SIGGRAPH Asia 2025 workshop co-organised with Zhejiang University and Shenzhen University, a sixty-view dataset released for a public challenge, and FreeTimeGS as a published baseline. The demonstration on the home page makes the point better than any argument, since a viewer can move around a moving scene in a plain browser with nothing installed.
Everything around that demonstration is still embryonic. There is no sign-up, no pricing, no trial and no documented public API. There are no terms of service, no privacy policy and no GDPR mention at all, no postal address and no full legal company name; the about section stays in Chinese even under the English prefix. The domain was registered on 03/09/2024 and first archived a day later, which places the company at the very start of its life. Producing 4D content is also not something a visitor can attempt alone: capture relies on a synchronised multi-camera rig, and the dataset released by the company itself was shot with sixty views.
The sensible reading today is that 4DV.ai is a technology partner rather than a product you subscribe to. Studios, agencies, XR teams and event producers with a project worth a bespoke conversation should look at the demonstration, judge the rendering quality for themselves and go through the business-cooperation form. Research teams have an immediate reason to engage through the workshop and its dataset. Anyone who needs contractual guarantees, a data protection framework or a self-service path should wait, and ask directly for the documents the site does not publish.
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