Esri

Esri is the geographic information system company behind ArcGIS, founded in 1969 and headquartered in Redlands, California. Its products span desktop analysis in ArcGIS Pro, hosted services in ArcGIS Online, on premises deployment in ArcGIS Enterprise, and a family of developer SDKs for the web, .NET, Qt and Unity. Gaussian splats now move through all of them as a first class layer type alongside terrain, imagery and photogrammetric mesh.

Splat support arrived when Esri announced Gaussian splatting in ArcGIS 3.6, and the capture side followed within months. Site Scan for ArcGIS gained splat layer creation for aerial photogrammetry in April 2026, then moved splat generation into the cloud the following month, and the May 2026 ArcGIS Reality release for ArcGIS Pro improved splat fidelity. Site Scan, ArcGIS Reality Studio, Drone2Map and ArcGIS Reality for ArcGIS Pro all run the same Reality Engine, so a splat produced in one arrives in the others without conversion.

Consumption ran a parallel track. ArcGIS Enterprise 12.1 brought splat layers to the Scene Viewer on premises, which put splats in front of organizations that cannot publish to a hosted service. ArcGIS Maps SDK for JavaScript 5.0 extended splatting to the web, and version 5.1 added 3D analysis on top of splat layers so measurement and slicing operate on the splat rather than on a derived mesh. ArcGIS Maps SDKs for Native Apps 300.1 carries the same layer into compiled desktop applications through the .NET and Qt SDKs, rendering splats in local scenes. Android and iOS are named as planned and are not supported in 300.1.

ArcGIS Maps SDK for Unity 2.4.0 makes Unity the third SDK line to carry splats, after the JavaScript SDK and the Native Apps SDKs. It adds an ArcGISGaussianSplatLayer for georeferenced splat datasets on desktop, with mobile listed as planned, alongside an ArcGISPointCloudSplatAlgorithm and a point cloud renderer and filter API. Two known issues ship with it and neither has a workaround. Splat layers occlude other content in the scene under BUG-000186431, and splat layer opacity cannot be adjusted because the layers always render opaque under BUG-000186432.

The delivery format is 3D Tiles 1.1 with glTF payloads. Esri's public Gaussian Splat Explorer gallery serves eleven splat layers, and every tileset lists KHR_gaussian_splatting and KHR_gaussian_splatting_compression_spz_2 as required extensions, so a client that does not implement SPZ 2 compression cannot read them at all. An ESRI_crs extension carries the coordinate reference system, which is what allows a splat to sit on a projected globe rather than in an arbitrary local frame. Esri was an early adopter of the glTF baseline the Khronos Group introduced for Gaussian splatting.

Practical constraints follow from the enterprise shape of the product line. ArcGIS Pro is Windows only, the Maps SDKs for Native Apps and for Unity handle splats on desktop targets only, and ArcGIS Reality processing is priced separately from the core ArcGIS licence. A survey firm already publishing photogrammetric mesh to ArcGIS Online can add a splat layer to the same web scene without changing how the scene is shared or secured.