Gaussian Splats
Gaussian splats represent a captured scene using many small, soft, semi-transparent ellipsoids rather than a conventional polygon mesh. Each Gaussian has a position, size, orientation, opacity, and view-dependent color. During rendering, these elements are projected and blended to recreate the appearance of the photographed subject from a new viewpoint.
The technique is especially effective for detailed real places, vegetation, hair, reflections, and irregular surfaces that can be difficult to reproduce with a clean polygon mesh. A typical workflow records many overlapping photographs or video frames, estimates the camera positions, and optimizes the Gaussians until the rendered views closely match the source images.
1 3DGS and 4DGS
3DGS, or 3D Gaussian Splatting, describes a static three-dimensional scene. The viewer can move through the result, but the captured objects do not change over time.
4DGS, or 4D Gaussian Splatting, adds time as another dimension. It can represent motion, changing expressions, performances, or other dynamic scenes. Because the Gaussians must also describe temporal change, 4DGS capture, processing, storage, and playback are generally more demanding.
Photogrammetry commonly produces a textured polygon mesh. Gaussian splatting instead preserves the captured appearance with a cloud of oriented, overlapping image-like primitives. Both methods can begin with overlapping photographs, but their final scene representations are different.
2 Editing Gaussian splats
SuperSplat Editor is a free, open-source, browser-based editor for Gaussian splats. It can inspect and transform a capture, remove unwanted floaters, crop the scene, adjust its appearance, combine splats, create camera animation, optimize the result, and publish it for browser viewing. The SuperSplat documentation explains the editing workflow and supported formats.
3 Gaussian splats on Apple Vision Pro
RealityKit in visionOS 27 introduces APIs for displaying Gaussian splats. Apple’s Gaussian splats on visionOS sample demonstrates loading splat data from a USDZ asset and presenting it as interactive spatial content.
This connects Gaussian splatting directly with Apple’s USDZ distribution workflow: the splat representation supplies the photographic scene, while the USDZ package provides a portable container that RealityKit can load as an entity. Because this support is recent, compatibility must be checked against the target visionOS version and viewer.
The modern real-time 3DGS method was introduced in the research paper 3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering.
For a practical comparison of capture, reconstruction, cleanup, conversion, and publishing software, see Tools for Gaussian Splats.
For a complete open workflow using COLMAP and Brush on a Mac, see Making 3DGS on Apple Silicon.