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Turning a Gaussian Splat Into a Videogame

· 12 min read
Iakov Sumygin
Software Engineer

Gaussian Splatting gives you photorealistic environments for free. The catch: a splat is just a cloud of oriented blobs - no triangles, no colliders, no navmesh, no lights. Drop a character in and they'll float through walls looking like they belong in a different universe.

This post walks through the demo I built to fix all of that:

  • 👉 Play it in your browser - WASD, mouse to aim, left-click to fire.
  • 👉 Check the project - the full PlayCanvas project is public. Every script mentioned in this post lives inside it, ready to read, fork, or remix.

The scene is a gorgeous indoor scan of a real abandoned place by Christoph Schindelar. Christoph is one the best artists working with Gaussian Splats out there, so when he proposed to scan a real place for me, I jumped at the opportunity. On top of that splat I bolted a physics collider, a grid of baked lighting probes, a Recast navmesh, eight personality-driven NPCs and a classic FPS loop. Everything runs in a browser tab.

PlayCanvas Open Sources SOG: The WebP of Gaussian Splatting

· 4 min read

Goodbye SOGS. Hello SOG! 👋

Back in May, PlayCanvas announced support for SOGS, a revolutionary super-compressed format for 3D Gaussian splats. While SOGS was a huge leap beyond other compression techniques, we were still not satisfied! So we set about designing a new and improved iteration of the format.

Today, we are proud to introduce SOG: Spatially Ordered Gaussians.

PlayCanvas Editor Frontend is now Open Source

· 3 min read
Kris Bamrah
Software Engineer

Today, we are thrilled to announce the open sourcing of the PlayCanvas Editor Frontend!

The PlayCanvas Editor is a powerful visual editing environment for building WebGL, WebGPU, and WebXR applications. It has been the cornerstone of countless incredible projects, many of which you can explore on the PlayCanvas website. While the PlayCanvas Engine has always been open source, the Editor Frontend, a key component of the PlayCanvas ecosystem, has not. That changes today!

Open Source

The PlayCanvas Editor Frontend is open-sourced under an MIT license on GitHub

Introducing SplatTransform: The Ultimate CLI Tool for 3D Gaussian Splats

· 4 min read

We're thrilled to announce the release of SplatTransform — a powerful CLI tool that makes working with 3D Gaussian Splats a breeze!

Open Source

When 3D Gaussian Splats began to revolutionize real-time rendering and photorealistic 3D content creation, we built SuperSplat, a visual editor for splats. But developers have continued to ask for better tools to manage, convert, and optimize their splat datasets. Our solution is to bring some of SuperSplat's most powerful features to the command line, courtesy of a new tool called SplatTransform. It's fast, flexible, and designed specifically for developers who need precise control over their Gaussian splat workflows.