PlayCanvas Super Splat Unveiled

PlayCanvas, a real-time collaborative platform for WebGL and WebXR apps, has launched an open source tool for interacting, viewing, editing, and resaving Gaussian Splats. While the platform is still in beta, there are still a lot of impressive features to try out.

PlayCanvas CEO Will Eastcott announced Super Splat on his Twitter, yesterday afternoon.

As a reminder, PlayCanvas is owned by Snap Inc. It will be very interesting to see how this progresses and if it makes its way into the Snap pipeline, joining their recent explorations into NeRF with MobileR2L.

Super Splat is designed with accessibility and efficiency in mind, operating directly within your browser without the need for additional downloads or installations; if you want to give it a try, click here! Alternatively, if you're more interested in diving directly into the code, check out the Super Splat Github page here.

Right now the only file types that are supported are processed .PLY files and when you resave, it currently does not include the spherical harmonic data. However, PlayCanvas engineer, Donovan Hutchence stated on Twitter that the move was made to save memory upfront and they will be incorporating it shortly. Hutchence was responding to a comment left by Aras Pranckevičius, creator the Unity extension for 3DGS and inventor of how to significantly reduce 3DGS file size. Aras also pointed to a link that will allow for the adoption of spherical harmonics. It's amazing how the internet works.

Some people have also reported trouble with using Luma's PLY file, but the PlayCanvas team said it should be working and is investigating.

The barriers to adoption continue to fall for Gaussian Splatting and we'll continue to monitor Super Splat's progression. It's also very encouraging to see members of the community interacting with posts and providing resources to benefit users.