The Babylon.js team has released Babylon Lite 1.33.0, which streams large gaussian splatting scenes in the browser through WebGPU.
Babylon Lite is published on npm as @babylonjs/lite and describes itself as "a lightweight, tree-shakable, WebGPU-first rendering library derived from Babylon.js." The full engine has carried splat features for longer, with SOG support arriving in Babylon.js 9.0 and splats joining the frame graph in 9.27.1. Babylon Lite already loaded files through loadSplat, loadSOG and loadSPZ, and those loaders are unchanged.
The streaming path, written by Cedric Guillemet, reads a lod-meta.json manifest that divides a scene into a spatial hierarchy whose leaves hold alternative levels of detail as loose SOG version 2 chunks. Babylon Lite draws a broad coarse version of the scene as soon as the first shared file reaches the GPU, then swaps in finer chunks, nearest leaves first, under separate limits on splat count, CPU memory, GPU memory, requests and decodes.
Gathering, projection and culling run in compute shaders. Surviving splats are compacted, ordered by a stable radix sort that keeps all 32 key bits across eight 4-bit passes, and rendered with one indirect draw. When several cameras view the same stream, one shared level of detail solve covers all of them.
Developers call loadGaussianSplatStream, attachGaussianSplatStream and disposeGaussianSplatStream, and the default budget is 1,000,000 splats. Color is limited to the base spherical harmonic band, so the loader rejects higher order spherical harmonics, packed .sog archives and SOG version 1. There is no WebGL or CPU sort fallback.
A live demo streams Paolo Tosolini's CC BY 4.0 capture of the alleys of Trogir, Croatia, with first person movement and a choice of a 1M splat lower memory mode or a 4M splat high detail mode. A fix in Babylon Lite 1.34.0 added those two memory modes, wall collisions and faster loading of nearby detail, and the change reports 38.2 FPS on average at the 1M setting on a Pixel 10 Pro XL, where the 4M mode exceeded the storage binding limit.
Babylon Lite 1.33.0 is available now on npm under the Apache-2.0 license.
