Where to build a Gaussian splatting experience: platforms and tools in 2026

The capture is done and the splat is trained: a PLY file of a few hundred megabytes sits on a hard drive. Now it has to be put in front of people, in a browser, in an app, in a headset, on a map, or in a film. In 2026 there are dozens of ways to do that, and the market is moving fast.

• Mergers. On 28 September, AMD announced it is buying World Labs, the company behind the Spark library.
• Closures. Niantic closed 8th Wall’s hosted platform in February and open-sourced part of it.
• Pivots. Luma AI has moved to generative video.
• Standards. The Khronos Group has ratified the glTF extension for splats.

Here are twenty platforms and tools, sorted by what they do, checked against their own documentation at the end of September 2026.

Which platform for which experience?

Where will people see it?

In a browser (link, QR code)AR on a phoneIn a headsetIn an app or a gameOn a mapIn a film or video

What does the project need?

Without codeOpen sourceVery large scenesAnimation, 4D

• SuperSplat · superspl.at Platform

  PlayCanvas’s free editor and hosting: clean, crop, then publish a link or an embed. The viewer is open source and can be hosted on your own site.

  • In a browser (link, QR code)
  • In a headset
  • Without code
  • Open source
  • Very large scenes

• Teleport by Varjo Platform

  Varjo’s capture and hosting service: share links and virtual tours, viewed on phones, computers and VR headsets.

  • In a browser (link, QR code)
  • In a headset
  • Without code
  • Very large scenes

• Polycam · KIRI Engine · Scaniverse Platform

  Capture apps that also host: scan with a phone, then share a web link or an embed.

  • In a browser (link, QR code)
  • Without code

• StorySplat · 3DVista Platform

  Virtual tours built on splats without code: waypoints, hotspots, embeds, VR.

  • In a browser (link, QR code)
  • In a headset
  • Without code

• Reflct · 3D Bits (Shopify) Platform

  Product viewers for online stores, with a Shopify app.

  • In a browser (link, QR code)
  • Without code

• Gracia Platform

  Animated (4D) splats, played on Quest, Pico, PC VR, Vision Pro and the web.

  • In a browser (link, QR code)
  • In a headset
  • Animation, 4D

• PlayCanvas Web engine

  The open-source web engine with the most complete splat support: streaming, WebGPU, relighting, collisions, WebXR.

  • In a browser (link, QR code)
  • AR on a phone
  • In a headset
  • Open source
  • Very large scenes

• Spark (three.js) Web engine

  World Labs’ splat library for three.js: streaming of 100 million splats and more, effects, experimental WebXR.

  • In a browser (link, QR code)
  • AR on a phone
  • In a headset
  • Open source
  • Very large scenes
  • Animation, 4D

• Babylon.js Web engine

  Microsoft’s open-source web engine; its splat support was much extended in version 9, in March 2026.

  • In a browser (link, QR code)
  • Open source
  • Very large scenes
  • Animation, 4D

• three.js Web engine

  Native splats since release r186, in 2026, without streaming yet.

  • In a browser (link, QR code)
  • Open source

• Needle Engine Web engine

  A commercial web engine on three.js, with splats through Spark and budgets tuned for mobile AR (version 6, in alpha).

  • In a browser (link, QR code)
  • AR on a phone
  • Very large scenes

• Unity Game engine

  No official support: aras-p’s open-source plugin (desktop, PC VR, maintenance only) or commercial plugins for Quest.

  • In an app or a game
  • In a headset
  • Open source

• Unreal Engine · Volinga · XScene Game engine

  No official support: Volinga (commercial: relighting, 4D, LED volumes) or XScene (open source).

  • In an app or a game
  • In a film or video
  • Open source
  • Animation, 4D

• Godot Game engine

  An open-source add-on, with mobile and VR renderers and collisions.

  • In an app or a game
  • In a headset
  • Open source

• RealityKit · MetalSplatter XR SDK

  Apple’s native splats in iOS, macOS and visionOS 27 apps; MetalSplatter is an open-source alternative.

  • In an app or a game
  • AR on a phone
  • In a headset
  • Open source

• Meta Spatial SDK XR SDK

  Native splats in Quest 3 and 3S apps: experimental, one splat per scene, at most 150,000 splats advised.

  • In an app or a game
  • In a headset

• Snap Lens Studio XR SDK

  Splats and animated splat sequences in Snapchat lenses.

  • AR on a phone
  • Animation, 4D

• Cesium Geospatial

  Streams splats as 3D Tiles on a globe, in the browser (CesiumJS) and in Unreal.

  • On a map
  • In a browser (link, QR code)
  • In an app or a game
  • Open source
  • Very large scenes

• Esri ArcGIS Geospatial

  Gaussian splat layers in ArcGIS Pro and in the ArcGIS Maps SDK for JavaScript.

  • On a map
  • In a browser (link, QR code)
  • Very large scenes

• Houdini · Blender · Nuke · Octane 3D and VFX

  Splats in VFX and 3D software: native in Houdini 22 and Nuke 17, imported by Blender 5.3, rendered by Octane.

  • In a film or video
  • Open source
  • Animation, 4D

Twenty platforms and tools that publish Gaussian splats, in six families: hosted platforms, web engines, game engines, XR SDKs, geospatial platforms, and 3D and VFX software. Ticking where people will see the splat and what the project needs keeps only the platforms that do all of it.

Hosted platforms: publishing without code

The quickest way to share a splat is a platform that hosts it and gives you a link. SuperSplat, PlayCanvas’s free editor, cleans and crops the scene in the browser, then publishes it to superspl.at:

• Compression. Published scenes are compressed to SOG.
• Streaming. Beyond a million Gaussians, they stream progressively.
• Annotations. Since February 2026, SuperSplat Studio adds annotations, cameras and effects.
• Publishing API. Since August, a publishing API lets other tools publish there directly, starting with Teleport by Varjo and XGRIDS LCC Studio.
• Open viewer. Its viewer is open source (MIT): you can export it as a single HTML file and host it yourself.

SuperSplat: Edit, Publish and Share 3D Gaussian Splats PlayCanvas · 0:56 Plays on YouTube, which may set cookies once you click.

Around it, the offer is specialising:

• Capture and hosting. Teleport by Varjo handles capture, hosting and virtual tours, viewed on phones, computers and VR headsets.
• Capture apps. Polycam, KIRI Engine and Scaniverse share their captures as web links or embeds.
• Tours. StorySplat and 3DVista build tours with waypoints and hotspots.
• Online stores. Reflct and 3D Bits put splats on Shopify product pages.
• Animation. Gracia plays animated (4D) splats on headsets and the web.

These services have a weakness: they come and go. Vid2Scene has closed, 8th Wall’s hosting ended on 28 February, and Luma no longer offers 3D among its products. Two rules follow. Always keep the master file, the PLY or its compressed version. And for anything that must last, prefer a viewer you can host yourself.

Web engines: your own experience in the browser

To go beyond a link, with your brand, a custom interface, hotspots, a product configurator or a game, you need a web engine. There are five serious ones.

• PlayCanvas (MIT) has the most complete support:
  • formats: PLY, SPZ and glTF, plus its own SOG and Streamed SOG, built for tens of millions of Gaussians;
  • a WebGPU renderer since June, up to twice as fast on an iPhone;
  • relighting, collisions and WebXR.
• Spark (MIT), World Labs’ three.js library:
  • version 2.0 in April streams scenes of 100 million splats and more with its .RAD format;
  • it mixes splats with meshes and adds effects, skeletal animation and experimental WebXR.
  • Its future depends on AMD, although the licence stays MIT.
• Babylon.js (Apache-2.0), Microsoft’s engine, much extended its splats in version 9, in March, with shadows, animation and splats generated by code.
• three.js added native splats in August 2026, without streaming yet. The old GaussianSplats3D library is no longer developed and points to Spark.
• Needle Engine, commercial, builds on Spark and tunes its budgets for AR on phones (version 6, in alpha).

Spark 2.0: Stream Massive 3D Worlds (100M+ Gaussian Splats) in the Browser World Labs · 0:39 Plays on YouTube, which may set cookies once you click.

The feature that changed everything in 2026 is level-of-detail streaming. The viewer no longer loads the whole scene: it shows a coarse version first, then refines only what the camera sees up close, within a fixed number of splats.

How a viewer shows a scene too big for the device

1. A coarse version of the whole scene arrives first: a few large splats, in a fraction of a second.
2. Finer levels replace it near the camera, tile by tile.
3. When the budget is spent, refinement stops: far away stays coarse, and the eye hardly notices.

Pause

An animated diagram of a landscape seen from a camera, cut into tiles. A coarse version of the whole scene appears first; finer levels then replace it near the camera, tile by tile, until the splat budget is spent; the far tiles stay coarse.

That budget depends on the device. The people who build the viewers publish their figures, and they vary by a factor of thirty between a Quest app and a desktop computer.

How many splats can each device take?

Your scene

2M splats

100K1M10M100M

• Quest 3, native app 150K Needs streaming Meta, Spatial SDK: avoid more than 150,000 splats, one splat per scene.
• Quest 3, browser 1M Needs streaming Spark: 1 million or less; its level of detail defaults to 500,000 there.
• Vision Pro 750K Needs streaming Apple publishes no figure, only an internal limit; 750,000 is Spark’s default budget.
• Android phone 1M–2M Borderline Spark: 1 to 2 million. PlayCanvas: about 1 million on mobile.
• iPhone 1M–3M Borderline Spark: 1 to 3 million. PlayCanvas: about 1 million on mobile, at twice the frame rate with WebGPU.
• Computer 1M–5M Borderline Spark: 1 to 5 million, 10 to 20 million on some. PlayCanvas: 3 million and more.

For a scene from 100,000 to 100 million splats, set with a slider, the budget each device can show smoothly according to the people who build the viewers, and a verdict for each: it fits, it is borderline, or it needs streaming.

Game engines and 3D software

Neither Unity nor Unreal Engine supports splats themselves. Unreal 5.8’s release notes don’t mention them, and nor do Unity 6’s. Everything goes through plugins:

• Unity: aras-p’s (MIT) for desktop and PC VR, which is now only maintained, or commercial plugins for Quest.
• Unreal: Volinga (commercial) adds relighting, LED volumes and, since July, animated 4D splats played in Sequencer. XScene is open source.
• Godot: an open-source add-on that also runs on mobile and in VR.

VFX software, on the other hand, has adopted splats:

• Houdini 22 trains, rigs, simulates and relights them.
• Nuke 17 composites them.
• Octane path-traces them.
• Blender 5.3, expected in November, imports and renders them but does not export them yet.
• OpenUSD has had its own splat schema since March. NVIDIA uses it in Omniverse to path-trace splats with shadows and reflections.

Headsets and native apps

Apple added native splats to RealityKit in iOS, macOS and visionOS 27, with its GaussianSplatComponent. There are three limits:

• The app reads the file itself: RealityKit takes raw data, not a PLY.
• The scene’s lighting does not affect the splats.
• An internal cap on the number of splats exists, and Apple does not publish its value.

MetalSplatter, open source, does the same on iPhone, Mac and Vision Pro.

WWDC26: Explore advances in RealityKit Apple Developer · 23:51 Plays on YouTube, which may set cookies once you click.

On Quest 3 and 3S, Meta’s Spatial SDK displays splats in native apps, still experimentally: one splat per scene, and no more than 150,000 splats. The browser often does better. WebXR viewers built on Spark, PlayCanvas or Arrival.Space show scenes of about a million splats. Android XR has no splat API yet, so the web is the route there too. And on phones, Snap’s Lens Studio puts splats, even animated ones, into Snapchat lenses.

Maps and sites

For large sites, splats become map layers:

• Cesium streams them as 3D Tiles with levels of detail, in the browser and in Unreal; its demo covers a 110-million-splat campus.
• Esri displays them in ArcGIS Pro 3.6 and, since February, in its JavaScript SDK.
• Bentley produces them with iTwin Capture.

Google’s photorealistic 3D Tiles, however, are still meshes.

One master, many platforms

What connects these platforms is the file:

• PLY stays the universal master.
• SPZ, Niantic’s open-source format, is read almost everywhere.
• SOG is PlayCanvas’s format and .RAD Spark’s.
• The glTF extension, now ratified, and OpenUSD are becoming the exchange standards.

SplatTransform, free, converts between nearly all of them. So the choice of platform is less binding than it seems: the same capture can feed a web viewer, an app and a film, as long as the master is kept.

At ARGO

For most of our clients the right answer is the browser. A link or a QR code opens the experience with no app, on phones and computers, and the Quest browser handles VR. We favour open-source viewers that we can host on the client’s own domain, with the scene sized for phones and streamed when it gets big. We move to a native app, an engine or a map only when the project needs it: a Vision Pro experience, an interactive installation, a site the size of a district.

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Sources and further reading

• Hosted platforms: PlayCanvas, SuperSplat · SuperSplat Studio · Publishing API · Teleport by Varjo · Scaniverse · StorySplat · 3DVista · Reflct · Gracia
• Web engines: PlayCanvas · PlayCanvas and WebGPU · Spark 2.0 · Babylon.js 9.0 · three.js splats · Needle Engine
• Engines and 3D software: UnityGaussianSplatting · Volinga, 4D splats · XScene · Godot add-on · Houdini 22 · Blender 5.3 · OpenUSD v26.03 · Omniverse particle fields
• Headsets and apps: Apple, GaussianSplatComponent · MetalSplatter · Meta, Spatial SDK splats · Snap, Lens Studio
• Maps: Cesium · Esri, GaussianSplatLayer · Google, 3D Tiles
• Market and formats: AMD, World Labs acquisition · Niantic Spatial, 8th Wall open source · Khronos, KHR_gaussian_splatting · Niantic, SPZ · PlayCanvas, SplatTransform

Platforms, versions and budgets checked on 30 September 2026.