The Problem with Traditional Virtual Tours
Kubang Badak is a mangrove geoforest within the Langkawi UNESCO Global Geopark — a place with genuine scientific and ecological value. The trail has geology, biodiversity, and a living community tied to the land. But like most natural heritage sites, the experience has always required physical presence.
Traditional virtual tours are a weak substitute. A set of 360-degree photos stitched together feels flat. You can pan around, but you can't move through the space. It doesn't carry the sense of being somewhere. For a geopark that wants to reach educators, researchers, and international visitors who can't make the trip to Langkawi, that gap matters.
When we started exploring 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) as a capture technology, Kubang Badak was exactly the kind of site we had in mind: dense, spatially complex, and worth experiencing properly.
What We Proposed
We brought the idea to Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM) through their Geopark Research Centre and Institut Alam Sekitar dan Pembangunan (LESTARI). The pitch was straightforward: instead of a conventional virtual tour, we would use 3DGS to capture the actual spatial geometry of the trail — producing a photorealistic, navigable 3D environment that visitors could explore on any browser.
3DGS works differently from traditional 3D scanning. Rather than building a mesh, it represents a scene as millions of tiny Gaussian splats — each one encoding colour, position, and opacity. The result is a reconstruction that holds fine visual detail: the texture of mangrove roots, the play of light through the canopy, the exact character of the terrain. It's not a render or a simulation. It's the real place, captured.
UKM and Lembaga Pembangunan Langkawi (LADA) came on board as partners. LESTARI and ALAF (Pusat Pengurusan Makmal Alami dan Fizikal) contributed their research expertise and ground-level access. This became a formal collaboration between TrueXR, UKM, and LADA.
Capture session at the Biogeotrail Kubang Badak
The Official Launch
On 12 March 2026, the Kubang Badak Biogeotrail Exploration Website was officially launched at the site. The launch was led by Datuk Seri Haji Iskandar bin Datuk Haji Mohd Kaus, Chief Executive Officer of LADA, alongside Prof. Madya Dr. Sharina Abdul Halim, Deputy Director of LESTARI UKM, representing the Pengarah of LESTARI.
Media, community representatives from Kubang Badak, government agencies, the Langkawi Tourist Guide Association, and industry players from the tourism sector were all present. It was a meaningful moment — a geopark community seeing its environment documented and made accessible to the world in a way that had never been done before in Malaysia.
The result is live at kubangbadak.my — Malaysia's first immersive geopark trail powered by 3D Gaussian Splatting, part of the Langkawi UNESCO Global Geopark.
Why This Project Matters
Kubang Badak is not a commercial venue. It's a living geoforest with research value, community ties, and a role in Langkawi's UNESCO designation. The goal was never to replace the physical trail. It was to extend its reach — so that a student in Kuala Lumpur, a researcher in Tokyo, or a tourist planning a future visit can experience it with real spatial depth.
3DGS is well suited to this because it scales to complex outdoor environments. Mangroves are difficult to capture: dense vegetation, uneven ground, varied lighting. Traditional photogrammetry struggles with that kind of scene. Gaussian Splatting handles it gracefully because it doesn't require clean geometry — it reconstructs from visual data alone.
For TrueXR, this project is also a proof of concept for a broader application: 3DGS as a tool for natural and cultural heritage preservation in Malaysia and across ASEAN. Kubang Badak is the first, but the method transfers to any site worth documenting.
- 3D Gaussian Splatting goes beyond 360-degree tours — it captures genuine spatial geometry, letting visitors move through a scene rather than just look around it.
- Malaysia's first immersive geopark trail is now live at kubangbadak.my, backed by LADA, UKM, LESTARI, and ALAF.
- Natural heritage sites are ideal candidates for 3DGS — complex outdoor environments that are difficult to capture with traditional methods but valuable to document and share.
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