The Khronos Group

The Khronos Group develops open standards for graphics and compute, and its glTF 2.0 format is the closest thing the field has to a neutral 3D interchange container. KHR_gaussian_splatting is the extension that brings 3D Gaussian splats into that container, defining splats by position, rotation, scale, opacity and spherical harmonic coefficients, and treating the field of Gaussians as a point cloud for storage purposes. Khronos introduced the baseline in February 2026.

The extension reached a status of Complete, Ratified by the Khronos Group on September 3, 2026, in a commit that updated the glTF extensions registry. The same commit removed the line in Known Implementations asking for implementations to be added before final ratification. Khronos has published no announcement and no press release, so the change is visible only in the repository.

Known Implementations now lists CesiumJS, Cesium Native, JSplat and 3dgs_ply2gltf. Cesium shipped KHR_gaussian_splatting support in CesiumJS and Cesium for Unreal in March 2026, and Babylon.js and PlayCanvas have both shipped it since without appearing in that table.

Ratification fixes the shape of the base extension. The required properties are kernel and colorSpace, the optional ones are projection and sortingMethod, and each carries exactly one defined value in the base specification, ellipse, two BT.709 color spaces, perspective and cameraDistance. Everything beyond that arrives as a nested extension, which is where compression lives, and the furthest along of those is still the draft KHR_gaussian_splatting_compression_spz_2. A renderer that does not recognise the extension falls back to drawing the primitive as a sparse point cloud through COLOR_0.

The contributor list reads as a map of who cares about splat interchange. Cesium supplied four contributors including Sean Lilley and Renaud Keriven, Niantic Spatial supplied two, Esri supplied two, Huawei supplied three, and single contributors came from NVIDIA and Autodesk alongside Khronos staff and independent developers including Arseny Kapoulkine and Marco Hutter. Niantic Spatial's participation matters because it also maintains SPZ, and Esri's because it ships splats in enterprise GIS.

Khronos held a public webinar on gaussian splatting in March 2026, and the specification text is published under CC BY 4.0 in the glTF repository on GitHub.

The ratified specification is readable now in the glTF repository.