Esri ArcGIS Reality for ArcGIS Pro May 2026 improves Gaussian Splat Fidelity
Michael Rubloff
ArcGIS Reality for ArcGIS Pro's May 2026 release improves 3D Gaussian Splatting fidelity. Esri demonstrates the improvement on a splat of the Te Awamako Substation in Otago, New Zealand, captured with imagery from Network Waitaki Limited. Substations are a useful stress test with a chain link fence, conductor lines, insulator stacks, and lattice steelwork together fail almost every photogrammetric assumption, and they are exactly the geometry Esri is pointing at with this release.
The second change is automated ground control. ArcGIS Reality for ArcGIS Pro can now detect and measure supported GCP and check point targets directly in input imagery and link those markers across the image set without manual tagging. Manual GCP placement has been one of the slowest steps in the pipeline. Esri has framed this throughout its 3DGS rollout as the differentiator versus general-purpose Gaussian Splatting tools. Outputs are tied to a defined coordinate system through the ESRI_crs 3D Tiles extension, and accuracy is governed by the same control workflows that govern orthos and meshes.
The third addition is sensor support for Cartosat-2 and Cartosat-3, the Indian Space Research Organization's Earth observation satellites. Cartosat-2 provides imagery at up to 1 meter resolution; Cartosat-3 goes to roughly 25 cm. That brings ArcGIS Reality for ArcGIS Pro's satellite input list into closer parity with what national mapping agencies and large infrastructure customers already use, particularly in South and Southeast Asia.
The web side companion piece, streaming the resulting splat layers into browser based scenes, was covered when Esri shipped the GaussianSplatLayer in ArcGIS Maps SDK 5.0. The output format produced by ArcGIS Reality for ArcGIS Pro is the same 3D Tiles JSON/3TZ package with the ESRI_crs and 3DTILES_content_gltf extensions documented for ArcGIS Pro 3.7's Gaussian splat layer support. PLY is not accepted. The data has to go through ArcGIS Reality or a third-party tool that emits a compliant 3D Tiles dataset.
