three.js

three.js is an open source JavaScript 3D library first released by Ricardo Cabello in 2010 under the MIT license. It renders through WebGL2 and through a newer WebGPU backend, and it is the library a large share of interactive 3D on the open web is built on. The package ships a core alongside an examples directory, examples/jsm, that carries loaders, camera controls, post processing passes and now a Gaussian splat renderer.

Splat rendering in three.js was third party work for its first two years. The GaussianSplats3D library arrived in January 2024 as the first three.js implementation, added spherical harmonics that May and 2D Gaussian splatting support that July. World Labs released Spark v2.0 in April 2026 as a second renderer for the same host. Each option is a separate dependency with its own loader set, its own sorting strategy and its own render path, so a three.js project choosing between them is choosing an architecture, not a feature flag.

Pull request 33950, authored by Ben Houston, moves that capability into the library. It adds a GaussianSplatMesh object written in TSL, the Three.js Shading Language, so a single implementation runs on both the WebGL and the WebGPU renderer rather than requiring a backend specific shader. Loaders cover PLY, SPLAT, SPZ and KSPLAT, and glTF import reads the KHR_gaussian_splatting extension the Khronos Group introduced in February 2026. A CountingSort compute class handles the back to front depth ordering that splat rasterization requires, which is the part every third party renderer has had to solve independently.

The first implementation is deliberately narrow. It resolves SH0 only, so the flat base color of each splat renders and the view dependent terms carried by higher spherical harmonic degrees do not. There is no level of detail scheme and no chunked streaming, so a scene loads whole and its memory and fill cost scale directly with splat count. A scan large enough to need paging is still a job for Spark or for a library built on it.

The work is milestoned r186 and is not in a tagged release. r185 is the current published version, so a project installing three.js from npm today gets a library with no splat renderer in it and still depends on Spark or GaussianSplats3D. That gap closes when r186 ships.

three.js is free, has no paid tier and imposes no commercial licence condition, which is one reason it sits underneath so much shipped splat work rather than alongside it. Gaussian splat viewers, product configurators, WebXR experiences and vendor SDKs including Varjo's Teleport.js all target three.js as their host, and Teleport.js pins three.js 0.180.0 as its floor. Native splat support in core changes what those integrations have to carry themselves.