How to Make a Gaussian Splat Load Fast on Phones

Most buyers will open the listing on a phone, so that is where your splat has to work. A scene that flies on your desktop can stutter, stall, or crash a phone browser. The fixes are mostly about doing less.

Why do splats choke on phones?

Four things, roughly in order of how much they matter:

• Splat count. Every splat has to be stored on the phone's GPU and sorted and blended whenever the view changes. More splats means more work on every frame.
• File size. The whole file has to download before the scene is complete, often over cell data, and then fit in the phone's memory.
• Spherical harmonics. These store how a splat's color changes with viewing angle, which is where reflections and sheen come from. Full third-degree SH adds 45 values per splat on top of the 3 for base color, per PlayCanvas's PLY docs.
• Graphics API. PlayCanvas measured its WebGPU renderer at about 2x faster than WebGL 2 on an iPhone 13 Pro Max with 1 to 4 million splats, and says WebGPU reaches roughly 85% of users. Everyone else falls back to WebGL 2 (PlayCanvas blog). You cannot control which one a buyer's phone uses, so plan for the slower path.

How big should a splat be for phones?

The clearest published budgets come from the Spark viewer's performance docs: about 1 to 3 million splats on an iPhone, 1 to 2 million on an Android phone, and 1 to 5 million on a computer. Spark is a different renderer from the SuperSplat viewer, so use those numbers as a rule of thumb, not a guarantee.

For a whole home, we suggest a ceiling of about 5 million splats, which comes out to roughly 50 MB as a SOG. That is above Spark's phone budget, and that is the point: 5 million is the most you should ship, not the target. A house at 2 to 3 million will feel smoother on more phones. Trainers routinely produce far more than that, so you will usually be cutting.

How do you cut a splat down in SuperSplat?

Open the trained file in the free SuperSplat editor and work through this list:

• Crop the yard and sky. Outdoor areas and the haze around a capture can hold a large share of the splats. If the backyard does not sell the house, crop it.
• Delete floaters. Use the brush, lasso, and box selection tools on the clouds of junk around windows, mirrors, and the edges of the scene, and on your own ghost.
• Try fewer SH bands. SuperSplat's SOG export has an SH Bands setting. Export once with all bands and once with fewer, and compare them on a phone. You may lose a little shine on floors and counters.
• Export as SOG. PlayCanvas's example is a 4 million splat scene that went from a 1 GB PLY to 42 MB as a SOG (PlayCanvas).

If it is still too heavy, the free command-line tool splat-transform can thin the whole scene at an even rate (its decimate option), drop SH bands, and remove low-opacity splats. Thin a copy, compare it on a phone, and keep the original. If your trainer lets you cap the splat count, try setting the cap there too. For the capture side, see how to make a 3D walkthrough with a 360 camera.

Should you use streaming and level of detail?

Streaming is the other approach. A streamed SOG is split into chunks at several levels of detail. The viewer loads the lowest detail first, so something appears almost at once, then fetches only the detail that the current view and the device can handle. PlayCanvas's example scene holds 24 million splats at its top level of detail, far more than a phone could hold at once, and still opens on one. SuperSplat now converts every upload to superspl.at into this streamed format automatically.

The tradeoffs: buyers see a soft version first that sharpens as they look around, and building your own takes splat-transform on the command line and produces a set of files instead of one. PFRE Tour accepts a single .sog file today, so on our platform the way to speed up a splat is to make it smaller.

How do you test it on a real phone?

Never deliver a splat you have only seen on a desktop. Before the agent gets the link:

• Open the actual link you will deliver, not a local file, on your own phone over cell data with Wi-Fi off.
• Time how long until the scene is usable, then drag through the main rooms and watch for stutter.
• If you can, borrow an older or mid-range Android phone. That is closer to what many buyers carry than a new iPhone.
• Check that the photo tour still loads first and that 3D is something the buyer opts into.

On PFRE Tour you can preview the walkthrough before you publish it, and inside the branded tour it only loads when a buyer taps "Explore in 3D." Phones that cannot run it still get the full photo tour. See how it works on our 3D walkthrough page.

Why does the opening view matter?

The first frame is the buyer's first impression, and on a phone they may not move much past it. A default camera can land outside the house, inside a wall, or staring at a cloud of floaters. Pick a spot that shows off the home, such as the entry looking into the main living space, and save that as the opening view. PFRE Tour lets you set it per tour before you publish. If you are still deciding whether splats are worth offering at all, read Matterport vs. a 360 camera and Gaussian splats.

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