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PlayCanvas

PlayCanvas

PlayCanvas

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PlayCanvas is a real-time collaborative platform and open source engine for WebGL and WebXR apps, with native 3D Gaussian Splatting support across its Engine and Editor and a family of splat tools including SuperSplat, SplatTransform, and the SplatViewer component.

Location

London, UK

Platform

Web (WebGL / WebGPU)

GPU

Any — runs in browser

Pricing

Free (open source)

License

MIT (engine)

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Best for

Interactive 3DGS web apps

Updated

July 2026

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 2.23.0 on October 1, 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 five 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.

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. The ecosystem builds on top of them too, with GigaSplat forking SuperSplat for experimental features and platforms like Bitbybit adding PlayCanvas support.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does PlayCanvas support Gaussian Splatting?

Yes — 3DGS is natively supported in both the PlayCanvas Engine and Editor, with unified gsplat rendering, SOGS compression for smaller files, and a dedicated SplatViewer component.

What is the difference between PlayCanvas and SuperSplat?

SuperSplat is PlayCanvas's free browser-based editor for cleaning up and editing Gaussian splats. The PlayCanvas Engine and Editor are for building interactive web apps and games that use those splats, and SplatTransform handles splat conversion and processing.

Is PlayCanvas free?

The PlayCanvas Engine is open source under the MIT license, and SuperSplat and SplatTransform are free to use.

Does PlayCanvas support fog with Gaussian splats?

Yes. PlayCanvas Engine 2.18.0 added per-splat scene fog through the GSplatParams.useFog API, enabled by default, and Engine 2.21.0 added volumetric fog through CameraFrame.volumetricFog on WebGL2 and WebGPU. Volumetric fog is raymarched against splat-authored depth from the depth prepass. Fog is not available in the SuperSplat Viewer, where it remains an open issue.

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