PlayCanvas 5.0 Released

Our recent guest on the View Dependent Podcast was Will Eastcott, CEO of SuperSplat and PlayCanvas. He mentioned on the day of the release that the team was working hard to push out updates to the platform in time for the episode. SuperSplat is rolling out updates at a rapid pace, pushing new Gaussian Splatting features out one after the next.

One of the standout improvements is the capability to render very large scenes—over 15 million splats—on Firefox and Safari, with Chrome already supported. Even more impressively, these massive scenes can now be compressed, opening up new possibilities for seamless large-scale visualization across browsers. For context, a scene I dropped in with 20 million splats at 4GB, was reduced to ~300MB.

One of my personal favorite additions is the new Reset Camera button, which centers the view on captures instantly. This has significantly sped up my workflow, especially in larger scenes where locating the capture can be challenging. I’ve found myself using it repeatedly, appreciating how it removes the guesswork and keeps navigation efficient.

Other enhancements include the ability to highlight splat selection outlines, simplifying navigation for translating objects or specific scene parts. And there’s more to look forward to—SuperSplat developer Donovan Hutchence teased the upcoming release of Orthographic View, a feature that will offer new perspectives and greater control over complex scenes.

As part of larger to come items, the larger PlayCanvas organization announced the release of 5.0, which brings some exciting Gaussian Splatting support and promises. First, it enables the viewing of ply files trained on 3DGS, but it has larger downstream effects. It’s an early step in the move over to WebGPU by the PlayCanvas team. While it’s still a little ways away, it’s exciting to begin seeing the transition. SuperSplat is not yet on the new Engine, but that does appear to be incoming.

Another former View Dependent Podcast guest, Olli Huttunen also just released a video on how to host .ply files on PlayCanvas. It’s a great video and hopefully will continue to evolve into a home for Radiance Field captures.

The SuperSplat editor can be accessed here and for those who want to check out their GitHub or make contributions to the MIT Licensed project, they can do so.