Timeline of Radiance Fields.
Radiance fields — including NeRFs and 3D Gaussian Splatting — reconstruct photorealistic, explorable 3D from ordinary photos and video. These are the milestones that built the field.
Updated July 2026
Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs)
A breakthrough method using deep neural networks to reconstruct lifelike 3D from standard 2D images or video.
2020Instant Neural Graphics Primitives (Instant NGP)
A significant speed improvement on NeRFs, enabling near-instantaneous inference.
20223D Gaussian Splatting
An alternative Radiance Field approach using splatting for fast, high-quality rendering.
20233D Gaussian Ray Tracing
A Ray Tracing based approach to reconstructing a Radiance Field using 3D Gaussians (not Gaussian Splatting).
2024Real-Time NeRF Rendering (Instant NGP 2.0)
NVIDIA fused Instant NGP's neural pipeline with just-in-time compilation via tiny-cuda-nn 2.0, making NeRF rendering roughly 5x faster and pushing it into real time.
2025Native Splat Support Arrives in Major 3D Tools
Gaussian splats became first-class citizens in mainstream 3D software, with Houdini shipping native splat representations and plugins like GSOPs bridging production pipelines.
2026Streamable 4D Gaussian Splatting
Volumetric 4DGS video became streamable — keyframes plus motion deltas delivered free-viewpoint volumetric performances over WebXR and to standalone headsets, no download required.
2026Gaussian Splatting at the Olympics
Olympic Broadcasting Services deployed gaussian splatting for replays at Milano Cortina 2026, marking the technique's arrival in mainstream live sports production.
2026