Building the Grace Cathedral Experience with PlayCanvas and Gaussian Splatting
I collaborated with Vincent Woo to transform his high-quality 3D Gaussian splats of Grace Cathedral into an interactive browser experience. Using the PlayCanvas Engine and WebGPU, we optimized rendering for millions of splats while ensuring smooth performance on mobile devices. The project features streamed data, dynamic camera navigation, and unique visual effects like a peek-through wall, all built on open-source foundations to make immersive 3D accessible to everyone.
Keeping the data on the GPU avoids the transfer bottleneck and makes the pipeline dramatically faster than the worker-based WebGL 2 renderer.