Princeton's Situated Interactions Lab has released SplatXR v0.1.0, an open source Unity toolkit for building interactive XR apps with Gaussian splats on standalone headsets.
SplatXR accompanies a UIST 2026 paper by Cyrus Vachha, Mohamed Kari and Parastoo Abtahi. Splats carry no explicit surface, so standard shadow and collision handling does not apply to them. SplatXR pairs each splat with an invisible mesh generated from it, and Unity's physics and shadow mapping act on that proxy while only the splat is drawn. SplatBridge 1.0.4 already bakes splats into a MeshCollider in Unity 6, but labels standalone Quest 3 as experimental.
The toolkit is organized as four building blocks added from a Building Blocks Panel in the Unity editor. Splat Renderer imports .ply files and offers a Base Renderer for a single splat and an LoD Renderer that swaps between three detail levels by distance. Splat Physics generates collision meshes for rigid body dynamics and shadow casting, with a marching cubes method in Object mode and Poisson reconstruction in Space mode, through a separate meshing tool whose Python source ships in the repository. Splat Effects provides Disintegrate, Radial Reveal and Digital Rain shaders plus a template for custom effects, and Splat Blending draws portal windows that blend a splat space with passthrough, with adjustable edge softness.
According to the paper, on Quest SplatXR takes the room mesh from the Meta Scene API and configures it as an invisible shadow catcher, so splats cast shadows onto physical surfaces. The paper also describes an offloaded pipeline in which a user selects a physical object, the headset sends the passthrough frame to a PC running SAM 3 and SAM 3D Objects, and a life size splat replica returns in an average of 2.38 minutes across four trials. That pipeline is not part of the v0.1.0 release.
On a standalone Quest 3, the authors measured SplatXR holding its 72 fps cap on objects of 50k and 100k splats and averaging 59 fps at 200k. Dense indoor viewpoints dropped to 36 fps at 200k, and the documentation recommends keeping visible splats under roughly 200,000 per scene.
Meta Quest 3 is fully supported. Apple Vision Pro is listed as mostly supported for rendering in VR and AR, and other Unity XR headsets as likely to work. SplatXR requires Unity 2022.3 or newer and was tested on Unity 6.2. The rendering shaders are adapted from GaussianSplats3D, the Three.js renderer Mark Kellogg released in 2023. In a developer study, three Unity developers each built an app over up to a week, and one hit unstable physics in large scenes while another saw a freeze after a portal added a second splat room. The maintainers say support will be limited and invite contributions.
SplatXR v0.1.0 is available on GitHub under the MIT license.
