Single-Image 3D Reconstruction from 360° Imagery: Experimental Findings Using Apple SHARP

@techreport{hamilton2026singleimage, author = {Hamilton, Michael P., Ph.D.}, title = {Single-Image 3D Reconstruction from 360° Imagery: Experimental Findings Using Apple SHARP}, institution = {Canemah Nature Laboratory}, year = {2026}, number = {CNL-TN-2026-005}, month = {january}, url = {https://canemah.org/archive/document.php?id=CNL-TN-2026-005}, abstract = {This field note documents experimental findings from testing Apple's SHARP model for 3D reconstruction from 360° imagery. The original hypothesis—that cubemap faces from a spherical capture could be processed independently through SHARP and merged into a unified scene model—proved incorrect. SHARP generates independent coordinate systems for each input image with inconsistent depth scales, making geometric fusion infeasible. However, the experiment yielded a productive reframing: each cubemap face produces a valid "terrarium"—a measurable 3D frustum suitable for per-view analysis. We developed a complete toolkit including high-resolution cubemap extraction, a custom WebGL2 Gaussian splatting renderer matching commercial quality, and format converters for GIS/CAD integration. Key finding: input image resolution significantly impacts splat quality; 1536px cubemap faces (from 6080×3040 source imagery) produce substantially better results than 512px extractions.} }