Painted Time

Built by artist Aditya Kumar, Painted Time is a spatial audio experience that transforms Canaletto’s Entrance to the Grand Canal, Venice into an explorable 3D world using Marble and Gaussian splatting.

The Experience

The project explores what it might have felt like to stand inside the painting — not just visually, but temporally and acoustically.

• Walk through a historical painting in 3D
• Spatially positioned environmental sound
• Historically researched Venetian audio sources

Canal water echoes below, distant bells ring across Venice, and seagulls drift over the lagoon as users move through the environment in real time.

How It Works

The original painting is processed through Marble to generate a Gaussian splat environment, then rendered in the browser using SparkJS and Three.js.

Spatial audio is powered directly through the Web Audio API using HRTF positional audio, allowing each sound source to exist in 3D space relative to the viewer’s movement.

Stack

• Marble for world generation from the source painting
• SparkJS + Three.js for realtime splat rendering
• Web Audio API for positional spatial audio
• Vanilla HTML and JavaScript frontend

What’s Next

• Painted Lineage, a new project exploring artwork provenance through navigable spatial experiences
• Expanded experiments around historical reconstruction and generative media
• New approaches to preserving cultural memory through immersive systems

Additional demos and project documentation available on GitHub.