Splat Report

Issue #2 · 2026-W39

Splat support kept moving into general tools: three.js now ships its own renderer, and PlayCanvas changed how streamed splats spend their budget. The week's papers were mostly about compression that can survive deployment, and Anthropic cut Opus pricing.

• 3D Webthree.js r186 ships a built-in Gaussian splat renderer for WebGPU and WebGL, with PLY, SPZ v4 and glTF loaders but no SOG.
• Gaussian SplattingA new paper trims spherical harmonics using only a trained scene and its camera poses, no training images needed.
• 3D WebPlayCanvas Editor 2.32 replaces the splat LOD distance fields with LOD Range and Falloff controls, so tuned scenes need retuning.
• Gaussian Splattingsplat-transform v3.6.0 writes SOG faster with byte-identical output, thanks to a radix Morton sort and concurrent texture stages.
• AI Dev ToolingClaude Opus 5.5 costs $4/$20 per million tokens, 20% less than Opus 5, and scores 66.4% on Terminal-Bench 4.0.
• ArchvizOpenFlyScan predicts where a drone survey will reconstruct badly and plans extra flight strips before you leave site.
• ArchvizNiantic Spatial opened a design-partner beta for mesh-guided splat relighting, covering time of day, fog and rain.