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 carries a status of Release Candidate. It is written against the glTF 2.0 specification and its Known Implementations section is empty, reading only as a note to add implementations before final ratification. That is the mechanically significant fact about the extension's current state, because Known Implementations is the table Khronos uses to demonstrate that a specification has been exercised by shipping code before it is ratified.

Three implementations exist regardless of what the table says. 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. The gap between shipped implementations and a specification document that records none of them is a documentation lag rather than a technical obstacle, but it does mean the extension has been sitting at Release Candidate while the ecosystem moved past it.

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, and single contributors came from NVIDIA, Autodesk and Huawei 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 extension is readable now in the glTF repository.