SuperSplat

SuperSplat is a free, open source Gaussian splat editor from PlayCanvas that runs in the browser and installs as a progressive web app. It is MIT licensed, so anyone can build on top of it, and GigaSplat is one fork that has done so. It reached version 3.0.0 on September 8, 2026, a ground up rewrite of both the renderer and the editor's data model onto WebGPU.

Version 3.0 requires WebGPU and no longer runs on WebGL2. It works in current Chrome and Edge, in Safari 26 or later, and in Firefox where WebGPU has been enabled, and it shows a localised startup message rather than a blank page where WebGPU is missing or hardware acceleration is switched off. The 2.x editor is preserved on the v2 branch, last released as 2.32.5, for anyone who has to stay on WebGL2.

The rewrite moved splat projection, frustum culling, compaction, depth sorting and draw submission onto the GPU on every frame, using a compute projector, a GPU radix sort and indirect draw, and it retired the CPU sort worker. Splat data now lives in chunked GPU storage with a small per gaussian instance list holding selection, locks and transform and colour indices, so the editor no longer keeps full floating point copies of a scene in JavaScript. On a 4.4 million splat scene loaded from a 990 MB PLY, PlayCanvas measured peak JavaScript heap falling from 1,557 MB to 105 MB at idle and from 1,673 MB to 142 MB while rendering 1080p video. Exports stream chunk by chunk through splat-transform, so PLY, compressed PLY, SOG, SPZ, .ssproj and Publish no longer materialise a whole scene before writing.

A sort free mode called Stochastic Alpha renders splats opaque and depth tested with per fragment coverage so heavy scenes stay responsive during an orbit, then draws a fully sorted and blended frame the moment the view settles, which means what a user sees at rest is exact. It offers Disabled, Enabled, Movement and Auto, and Auto is the default, holding the sorted path until a sorted frame's GPU time proves slow. Selection was rebuilt around two independent switches, Selection Depth for splats on the visible surface and Selection Footprint for whole gaussian footprints, replacing the older surface and through toggle, and every two dimensional and three dimensional selection tool honours both. A 3D Sphere Brush depth picks each stroke sample to a world position so the brush follows the surface, and zero alpha splats became selectable. Histograms, range selection, colour matching, bounds and every selection intersect pass run as GPU compute.

The interface was reorganised alongside the renderer. An Appearance popup controls how Gaussians, Centers and Rings are drawn, with separate tint strength for selected and unselected splats, and it replaces the old Centers and Rings mode toggle together with the Show and Hide Splats button. Tab switches every display overlay off and on without disturbing the settings behind them. Settings became Preferences and holds only application preferences, while a new Overlays popup holds viewport state including the grid, bounding box, camera poses and a Frame Timings graph reporting minimum, median and 95th percentile GPU frame time. Each grid plane toggles independently, and .ssproj documents moved to version 1, storing each layer's instance list alongside the shared static data while still opening version 0 projects from the 2.x line.

The editor sits inside a wider PlayCanvas splat toolchain and is built on PlayCanvas Engine 2.22.0 and splat-transform 3.3.3. Version 2.30 added LCC2 import with format agnostic level of detail selection, 2.32 added a three point grid alignment tool, and a REST publishing API opened the editor to third party tools. Compute based WebGPU rendering and automatic streamed level of detail first arrived in June 2026, which is the work version 3.0 completed by removing the WebGL2 path entirely. SuperSplat Studio is the hosted counterpart PlayCanvas announced in February 2026, and SplatTransform, the command line tool the editor's exports run through, reached v3.0.0 with a sevenfold speed increase.