Fei-Fei Li's World Labs open-sources Spark 2.0, streaming rendering of over 100 million 3D Gaussian points within the browser

ME News report, April 15 (UTC+8). According to monitoring by 1M AI News, spatial intelligence company World Labs released the open-source 3D Gaussian Splatting (3D Gaussian Splatting, 3DGS) rendering engine Spark 2.0. Its core capability is streaming and rendering large-scale 3D scenes composed of more than 100 million Gaussian points (splat) in the browser on any device, covering desktop, iOS, Android, and VR headsets.

Spark is built on THREE.js and WebGL2, with WebGL2 being the 3D graphics interface supported by almost all devices today. Most consumer-grade devices can only render 1 million to 5 million Gaussian points at interactive frame rates, while large-scale 3D scans often contain tens of millions or even hundreds of millions of points, with raw data sizes of 1GB or more.

Version 2.0 addresses this bottleneck with three new technologies:

1. Level of Detail (LoD) system: organizes all Gaussian points into a hierarchical tree, where each parent node is a low-resolution approximation of its child nodes. During rendering, it automatically traverses from coarse to fine based on the viewing angle, selecting the optimal subset. By setting a rendering budget (500k to 2.5 million points), it ensures stable frame rates regardless of the total number of points in the scene.
2. Progressive streaming: the newly designed .RAD file format supports random access and progressive transmission. After opening a scene, a rough outline made up of 64.0k points is displayed immediately, and then details are loaded step by step with viewing-angle priority. When the user moves, the priorities are automatically re-sorted.
3. Virtual VRAM management: allocates a fixed 16 million-point memory pool on the GPU. Using 64k points as a page, it automatically swaps data in and out, similar to an operating system’s virtual memory mechanism, enabling limited video memory to access nearly unlimited scene data.

The core algorithm is written in Rust and compiled to WebAssembly, running in a background Web Worker thread so it does not block the main rendering loop. Spark was originally an internal renderer developed by World Labs for its 3D world generation product Marble, and later open-sourced as a general tool. This release also demonstrates multiple community projects, including a multiplayer space shooter game Starspeed built with Marble and Spark. The entire game environment is made up of more than 100 million Gaussian points and runs directly in the browser.

(Source: BlockBeats)