ovenchips

One other little easter egg you may not have noticed. There's an American flag gently fluttering in the breeze on top of a nearby building. We were discussing whether to adds some birds as well, but that never made the final cut. You ask about factoring lighting away from the scene - actually, PlayCanvas can already do relighting and shadow-casting for gaussian splat-based scenes:

https://playcanvas.com/examples/#/gaussian-splatting/relight...

Some kind of day/night toggle would have been another great feature...but again, it didn't make the final cut of the experience. Maybe a HD Remix is needed. :o)

Yes, the cars are separated out and procedurally animated. They're splats, like the rest of the scene. Easily done in PlayCanvas - simple but effective!

Yes. They're Gaussian splats like the rest of the scene. PlayCanvas has a global sort so they render correctly regardless of camera angle.

For anybody interested, SuperSplat (and PlayCanvas) is open sourced on GitHub: https://github.com/playcanvas

I completely agree with you. I'm constantly bowled over by the creativity of the SuperSplat/PlayCanvas communities.

I built PlayCanvas in 2011 to power video games. Here we are in 2026 and it's powering strawberries.

The SOGS compression technique works well. You can get 1M Gaussians with full spherical harmonics in about 14MB. There's a good article about it on the PlayCanvas blog:

https://blog.playcanvas.com/playcanvas-adopts-sogs-for-20x-3...

When you say that PlayCanvas is commercial, that's a little misleading. The PlayCanvas Engine (analogous to Three.js and Babylon.js) is free and open source (MIT). The PlayCanvas Engine is where you'll find all the cool 3DGS tech. There are two further frameworks that wrap the Engine (for those that prefer to use a declarative interface): PlayCanvas Web Components and PlayCanvas React. Again, both of these are free and open source (MIT). Only the PlayCanvas Editor (analogous to a browser-based Unity) has optional payment plans (for those that want to create private projects).

PlayCanvas Engine: https://github.com/playcanvas/engine

PlayCanvas Web Components: https://github.com/playcanvas/web-components

PlayCanvas React: https://github.com/playcanvas/react

This application was built on PlayCanvas Web Components: https://github.com/playcanvas/web-components/

It's very similar to PlayCanvas React, but with a fully Web Components-based architecture. You can use the same scripts interchangeably between both frameworks.

I can't find the easter egg. Clues appreciated. :)

We deployed a fix for Firefox today. Can you try again and let me know how it goes?

It maps incredibly well to the Entity-Component System in the PlayCanvas Engine too.

https://github.com/playcanvas/supersplat/

To be as accurate as possible, yes, you need to consider lighting/shadows. But trust me, in many circumstances, you can copy+paste gaussians and it looks 'good enough'. It depends on the scene and the edit you want to make.

Coming very soon is:

- Copy & Paste: e.g. delete a tree and fill the hole with a copied patch of grass

- Color Adjustments: tinting, brightness, etc.

If these aren't editing ops, I don't know what is. :) Sure, you _could_ go back and recapture photogrammetry or rerun training, but that's super costly in terms of time. SuperSplat lets you make simple edits quickly and easily.

Hi Ben! I would argue that it is very useful for splats to be edited in this way. I couldn't have built this application without SuperSplat for isolating, cleaning, transforming and optimizing/compressing the PLY:

https://playcanv.as/e/p/cLkf99ZV/

Integrating AI is an interesting topic and something that certainly has potential.

Understood! As a little update, the PWA got offline mode support in v0.18.0. We're now adding improved file open+save support which should be done by the end of the week.

Thanks for the feedback. I agree that the performance improvements are the biggest win here. The PWA support is essentially the starting point, bringing installation and file association. Next up, we'll tackle file save using the File System API (instead of relying on sending exported scenes to the Downloads folder). I'm also keen to implement an offline mode (via Service Worker) soon too. Almost all SuperSplat users launch it in a desktop OS...so the PWA testing was done there. But out of curiosity, what should we tackle to make the experience great on mobile in your view?

They feel pretty close to shipping this to me: https://webkit.org/blog/14879/webgpu-now-available-for-testi... They recently shipped an update that resolves all issues running PlayCanvas' WebGPU backend. My guess is that we're looking at 6-12 months to reach production. To track WebGPU support, I recommend this awesome site: https://web3dsurvey.com/webgpu

I think you'll begin to see more advanced particle systems and physical simulations for a start. And 3D Gaussian Splatting will probably benefit too (since compute will probably enable much faster sorting of splats). So it's not really that this stuff wasn't possible before...but compute will enable these techniques to run far faster.

It's a bit more complicated than than. The front-end framework that the PlayCanvas Editor is built on (PCUI) is also open source: https://github.com/playcanvas/pcui Other open source tools like the glTF viewer are also built on it: https://github.com/playcanvas/playcanvas-viewer The rest of the Editor code is unminified and unobfuscated. The is done deliberately so devs can write extensions, report bugs and generally understand how it works. More of the Editor codebase will be open sourced over time.

No, it's also designed for developers building AR/VR, playable ads, 3D configurators, architectural visualizations and more. Basically, if you want to build and publish any WebGL content, PlayCanvas has your back. The 'Awesome List' has a selection of interesting use cases: https://github.com/playcanvas/awesome-playcanvas#awesome-pla...

I've kicked off a new forum thread on this topic: https://forum.playcanvas.com/t/improving-search-results-for-... Excited to get peoples' thoughts on it.

No problem! Thanks for your feedback too. The examples browser is really designed to be a vehicle to learn and experiment with the engine run-time. It should be a great resource for engine-only developers - so hopefully the dvh will find it interesting. We've done a ton of work on the API reference recently too (https://developer.playcanvas.com/en/api/). It's a huge task, but yeah, we're working night and day to make the runtime easier to work with.

Thanks for the feedback! Good to hear that you experienced good performance from PlayCanvas in your tests. The majority of PlayCanvas users to opt for the Editor rather than using the Engine standalone, so yeah, the developer resources are biased a bit in that direction. But we are working hard to rebalance things towards the engine. For example, we're about to release a new engine-only examples browser app that's really cool. Key an eye out for it. :)

No, it's used for AR/VR, playable ads, 3D configurators, automotive, arch viz and more. See:

https://github.com/playcanvas/awesome-playcanvas#awesome-pla...

You just need this:

https://github.com/playcanvas/playcanvas-sync

I recommend checking out the newly released playcanvas-sync tools which let you map your PlayCanvas project's assets to your local machine's file system: https://github.com/playcanvas/playcanvas-sync Also, last month, the plans received a major upgrade: https://blog.playcanvas.com/plan-updates-more-storage-more-f...

PlayCanvas was started by ex-EA/Activision/Sony devs. But Mozilla partnered with PlayCanvas to open source the engine and later launch Firefox's WebGL 2 support with the After the Flood demo: http://aftertheflood.playcanvas.com/

There's no networking built-in to the core engine but there's a tutorial to get started with Node.js: https://developer.playcanvas.com/en/tutorials/real-time-mult... PlayCanvas also works great with third party networking solutions like Nakama from Heroic Labs: https://heroiclabs.com/