ArcGIS Enterprise 12.1 Brings Gaussian Splat Layers to Scene Viewer On-Premises

ArcGIS Enterprise 12.1 supports Gaussian splat layers in Scene Viewer, putting splat visualization inside organizations’ own infrastructure for the first time. The release, which Esri shipped in early May for Windows and Linux, is also the first long-term support release of the 12.x generation, carrying roughly four years of support. This means splat layers are now part of the version of Enterprise that risk-averse government and utility deployments will standardize on.

Esri’s gaussian splat layers, are now supported in Scene Viewer, suited for visualizing detail across infrastructure, vegetation, and urban environments. The sharing path runs through ArcGIS Pro, where splat layers created from reality capture data can be published as web layers and web scenes to Enterprise 12.1 and later. Earlier Enterprise versions cannot receive them. Esri’s documentation also covers uploading packaged 3D Tiles (.3tz), reflecting that splat delivery rides on 3D Tiles rather than Esri’s I3S format.

Enterprise 12.1 completes a progression Esri has been working through product by product. Gaussian splatting first appeared in ArcGIS Pro 3.6, then reached browser developers through the Maps SDK for JavaScript 5.0. The remaining gap was organizations that keep their GIS portals on-premises. A large share of Esri’s government, defense, and utility customer base that cannot push reality capture data to ArcGIS Online.

The move also adds the largest enterprise GIS vendor to the geospatial splat convergence that has accelerated this spring across Cesium’s 3D Tiles LOD work, MapTiler’s GeoSplats beta, and the SPZ format’s consolidation. Splats as a standard geospatial layer type, served from standard tiling infrastructure, is increasingly the default assumption rather than the experiment.

A companion Esri post details the Scene Viewer changes in 12.1, and the splat layer documentation in ArcGIS Pro covers authoring requirements and sharing constraints.