alt Hacker NewsLast week I wanted to quickly view some Gaussian splats which I had trained on a remote server that didn’t have any open ports or a display device. So I ended up downloading everything locally just to inspect the results
This weekend I put together a terminal-based Gaussian splats viewer that renders directly in the terminal. It works over SSH and currently runs on CPU only and written in rust with claude code. I’ve found it to be pretty useful for quickly checking which .ply files correspond to which scenes and getting a rough sense of their quality.
Along the way, I also wrote a small tutorial on the forward rasterization process for Gaussian splatting on CPUs. You can check out the project here
For large georeferences textured meshes, generally 3D Tiles is used which uses a hierarchy of oriented bounding boxes to support various LODs. If you split up your model into chunks as well as diferent LOD levels, the viewer can then request chunks based on what is in the view port as well as the zoom level. The Cesium implementation leaves a lot to be desired; it't pretty tricky to get right. This will become commonplace since 3D scans are getting more common.