# Gaussian Splatting in the Browser

**Track:** Advanced 3D — Advanced Creative Coding — proposed (50)
**Framework / surface:** three.js
**Level:** Hard
**Prerequisites:** 3D Coordinate Space & Meshes, Post-Processing Pipeline

**In one line:** Load and render radiance fields; composite splats with meshes.

## Theory, aesthetics & inspiration

Gaussian splatting represents a captured scene not as a mesh but as millions of anisotropic 3D Gaussians, each defined by position, covariance, opacity, and view-dependent color encoded in spherical harmonics. Introduced by Bernhard Kerbl, Georgios Kopanas, Thomas Leimkühler, and George Drettakis at SIGGRAPH 2023, the method projects these ellipsoids to screen and alpha-blends them back-to-front, achieving photorealistic radiance fields at real-time rates where the earlier NeRF approach required slow volumetric integration. Rendering in the browser hinges on fast depth sorting and WebGL or WebGPU blending; compositing splats with conventional meshes demands reconciling their depths. The aesthetic is uncanny photographic fidelity—soft, view-dependent, reconstructed reality rather than authored surface.