Gaussian splats are a rather new rendering technology we have written about before on Architosh. Now The Khronos Group has developed a standard working alongside industry leaders.
glTF 2.0
Khronos has announced an official glTF release candidate that enables storing 3D Gaussian splats in glTF 2.0. The release candidate allows for broad industry feedback prior to an official ratification of the standard to make sure it truly meets the needs of the industry broadly.
3D Gaussian splat tileset of a chemical refinery embedded with Celsium World Terrain in CesiumJS. (Data and image from Bentley Systems).
Gaussian splats support via glTF happens via the KHR_gaussian_splatting baseline extension. Splats are an important new geometry and visualization technology in 3D industries like AEC and infrastructure, among others. They support real-time graphics, digital twins, and large-scale geospatial visualization.
Neil Trevett, president of the Khronos Group, says:
KHR_gaussian_splatting marks a major milestone for glTF, extending the format to support an entirely new class of geometric representation. By bringing the Gaussian splatting community together around a standards-based approach, Khronos is helping ensure this powerful new rendering technique can scale across tools, platforms, and the web.
Gaussian splatting is a radiance field representation technique that converts multiple 2D images into realistic 3D assets. Applications supporting this format use a collection of photos and videos to create a type of 3D point cloud data of an object or scene–more commonly a scene in the AEC and infrastructure industries. Cesium is one of the bigger exciting visualization platforms with Gaussian splat support.
MORE: D5 Render and Cesium Integration Unlocks City-Scale Storytelling
Gaussian splats are extremely useful for infrastructure, as seen in the Bentley-supplied image above of a chemical plant. Geospatial and similar AEC industry workflows are all well-suited, including:
- City-scale and corridor-scale reality capture
- Complex natural environments with vegetation and irregular geometry
- Reflective, translucent, or detail-rich urban surfaces
- Rapid field acquisition using commodity cameras, drones, or mobile devices
Gaussian spattting has also been adopted by other industries not yet mentioned in this article, including photojournalism, media and entertainment (M&E), robotics training, cultural preservation, and is well-positioned to bring 3D reality capture to social media. Despite this, generation, training, rendering, and compression techniques continue to evolve and advance.
Industry Need for Standardization
A need for standardization is important to prevent fragmentation in this critical new technology. The Khronos Group has been the steward of dozens of key industry standards in CAD and 3D technologies over the decades. The Khronos 3D Formats Working Group is focused on this development with Gaussian Splats resulting in the KHR_gaussian_splatting glTF extension.
KHR_gaussian_splatting extends the glTF 2.0 mesh primitive to represent 3D Gaussian splat datasets, including:
- Position, orientation, and scale
- Color and opacity attributes
- Interpretation rules for rendering spats rather than triangles.
With the extension, compatible renderers interpret primitives as Gaussian splat datasets. This eases the new standard and technology into existing tooling pipelines. To learn more, visit here for all the details.
