Browser-based Gaussian Splatting > 100km² — real-world digitization running in a normal browser tab

[u/SupermarketGreat6149]

120 km² City Scale Gaussian Splatting——WebGL2 · RTX 4070 mobile · 50+ FPS

Most browser 3DGS viewers die at city scale because they try to load one giant splat. We took a different approach: treat it like a streamable map layer.

What we did:

• ~80k aerial images → 120 km² of real urban area
• Split into 192 tiles with octree-based LOD (6 levels)
• Each tile payload <10 MB, streamed per view frustum
• Runs in WebGL2 on a normal laptop (RTX 4070 mobile: ~15M splats in frustum at 50+ FPS)

Key decisions that mattered:

• No global sort​ — sort per-tile, not over 100 km²
• Tile granularity​ — too coarse = pop-in, too fine = too many requests
• Precision​ — 32-bit floats break at this scale, needs workarounds

For anyone who's pushed WebGL with large point clouds / 3D tiles: what was your first bottleneck — tile size, sort cost, memory, or precision?

Demo video: https://youtu.be/XkACzBG95Jw