PlayCanvas

PlayCanvas is a real-time collaborative platform and open source engine for WebGL and WebXR apps that has become one of the most active homes for gaussian splatting on the web. 3DGS support landed natively in the full PlayCanvas Editor in 2024, and the Engine has shipped steady splat-focused releases since, including unified gsplat rendering performance and customization in Engine 2.13 and continuing through Engine 2.24.0 on November 9, 2026. Engine 2.18.0 added per-splat scene fog through a new public API, GSplatParams.useFog, which defaults to true, and Engine 2.21.0 added volumetric fog through CameraFrame.volumetricFog on both WebGL2 and WebGPU, raymarched against splat-authored depth from the depth prepass. Engine 2.23.0 removed the error based level of detail mode, so splat detail is always chosen by camera distance, and a scene wide splat budget either fills detail up to a target or only caps it. The same release added an opt in stochastic mode on the WebGPU GPU sort renderer that draws splats unsorted with dithered coverage and depth writes, and streamed level of detail now loads the chunks nearest the camera first.

PlayCanvas also drives much of the web's 3DGS compression story: the team introduced Spatially Ordered Gaussians (SOGS), which the Engine adopted to make splats dramatically smaller for web delivery. Alongside the engine, PlayCanvas released Blocks and a responsive, composable SplatViewer component for displaying Gaussian splats, and community tutorials have shown full playable games built from a captured splat.

The engine reads six splat formats. Alongside PLY, compressed PLY and SOG, Engine v2.21.0 added loading of glTF assets carrying the Khronos KHR_gaussian_splatting extension and of SPZ. Streamed SOG stores SOG chunks in a spatial tree across multiple level of detail levels and is produced by SplatTransform. Engine v2.24.0 added native loading of XGRIDS LCC2 scenes, including SPZ based LCC2 scenes through new support for SPZ version 3 files, and added loading of SOG version 3, a fourth band of spherical harmonics in PLY files, per splat anti aliasing detected from the file, and a VoxelOccupancy class that an engine example uses for a splat particle blast.

The company maintains a family of open splat tools. SuperSplat, the browser based gaussian splatting editor, reached 3.0.0 on September 8, 2026, a WebGPU only rewrite that drops WebGL2 and was built on PlayCanvas Engine 2.22.0 and splat-transform 3.3.3, with the 2.x line preserved on the v2 branch at 2.32.5. SplatTransform, its splat conversion and processing tool, reached v3.0.0 in July 2026 with a sevenfold speed increase. splat-transform v3.11.0, released on November 10, 2026, makes version 3 of the SOG format its default output, adding opacity above 1, an optional fourth spherical harmonics band and per Gaussian blind data, and version 3.11.1 makes its HTML output embed SOG v3 as well. Version 3.11.2, released on November 12, 2026 with Engine 2.24.1 and supersplat-viewer 1.43.2, moves SOG v3 rotations out of the alpha channels of the means and scales textures into their own quats.webp texture, because WebKit premultiplies decoded images under WebGPU, so SOG v3 files written by 3.11.0 and 3.11.1 no longer load in the updated readers and a SOG v3 file with spherical harmonics now uses seven textures. The ecosystem builds on top of them too, with GigaSplat forking SuperSplat for experimental features and platforms like Bitbybit adding PlayCanvas support.