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.
- magarnicle
Embedding the app inside the webpage is not a great idea. My PC couldn't really handle it so I couldn't read the page.
- muglug
Lovely to hear the choir rehearsing a psalm sung in the longstanding Anglican choral tradition (Psalm 91 to a tune by H. Walford Davies).
Having spent a lot of time in those sorts of churches, feels weird to walk right up to the altar.
- skanga
Fantastic Work!
You mentioned that "Everything beneath the Grace Cathedral experience is built on open source foundations." How feasible is it for a novice to build such an experience. Say I wanted one for my own house (should be MUCH less challenging)