Apple

Apple added Gaussian splats to RealityKit in visionOS 27, presented in WWDC26 session 279. A splat is represented by GaussianSplatResource, backed by GaussianSplatResource.BufferResource, and placed in a scene through GaussianSplatComponent. The API is format agnostic. An application supplies position, scale, rotation, opacity and spherical harmonic buffers directly, and Apple publishes no splat file format of its own, so parsing PLY, SPZ or SOG remains the application's responsibility. Until this, splat playback on Apple hardware came from third party work including MetalSplatter and Spatial Fields, alongside Apple's own use of the representation in Apple Maps Flyover.

Apple is a founding member of the Alliance for OpenUSD and worked with NVIDIA, Adobe and Pixar on Particle Fields, the USD primitive type that carries Gaussian splats inside a USD scene alongside meshes, materials and lights. The schema family landed as UsdVolParticleField in OpenUSD 26.03 in March 2026, with UsdVolParticleField3DGaussianSplat as the splat implementation and a reference renderer under hdParticleField in the imaging examples. Apple presented the primitive at WWDC26 session 285 and states that it also covers other representations from the same area of research, so the type is not scoped to 3D Gaussian splatting alone.

USDKit is the Swift framework Apple introduced alongside the primitive, giving applications a native path to read, author and compose USD stages without dropping to the C++ OpenUSD library. Apple positions SwiftUSD and OpenUSD itself as the alternative integration routes for teams with existing pipelines. In the same release Apple helped publish the first formal specification for the core of USD, with domain specifications for geometry, materials and physics underway.

Preview on Mac gained 3D editing in the same cycle, covering direct object manipulation, property and lighting edits, scene hierarchy work, and asset conversion and compression, without a dedicated 3D application. Preview and Quick Look now offer a choice of three renderers. RealityKit gives consistent results across Mac, iPhone, iPad and Vision Pro, Storm remains for existing production pipelines, and a new Raytracer targets high fidelity output on complex scenes. All three support OpenPBR in place of USDPreviewSurface. A Spatial Preview framework carries a live session between a Mac and Vision Pro, and Safari gained a model tag that puts USD content directly in a web page.

The practical effect for splat work is that a capture can now travel through Apple's stack as USD rather than as a vendor format. Scaniverse added USDZ export in July 2026, and Apple Maps Flyover is moving to a Gaussian splatting representation. Third party viewers remain the route for arbitrary splat files, with MetalSplatter reaching v1.0 in February 2026 and Spatial Fields shipping v1.2 in January.