Real-Time 3D Gaussian Splatting Pipeline for Modern Web Viewers
Architecting high-fidelity neural radiance field alternatives using GPU radix sorting and WebGPU compute dispatches in web browsers.
3D Gaussian Splatting provides real-time photorealistic scene reconstruction directly in the browser. Unlike implicit NeRF fields, Splatting treats scenes as collections of 3D Gaussians, enabling fast rasterization on web GPUs.
1. GPU Radix Sorting for Alpha Blending
Proper transparency rendering requires sorting millions of 3D Gaussian splats back-to-front every frame based on camera orientation. Executing parallel radix sorting via WebGPU compute shaders maintains fluid 60 FPS performance.
2. Spherical Harmonics Evaluation in Fragment Shaders
View-dependent directional coloring is achieved by evaluating spherical harmonics coefficients in fragment shaders, producing view-dependent specularity and realistic reflections.
3. Chunked PLY File Streaming & Compression
Compressing Gaussian covariance matrices and streaming binary PLY payloads via chunked HTTP range requests allows instant progressive loading of dense photorealistic captures.