Gaussian bouquets

A way to display gaussian splats, even bad ones in touchdesigner.

Workshop coming soon.

So, What Exactly Is a Gaussian Splat?

At its core, a Gaussian splat is a tiny, fuzzy ellipsoid — a 3D blob with a position, a size, a rotation, a color, and an opacity. Render millions of these blobs together, each one contributing a soft splash of color to the final image, and something remarkable emerges: a photorealistic scene you can view from any angle.

The technique was introduced in the 2023 paper 3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering by Kerbl et al., and it quickly took the research community by storm. The reason? It combined two things that rarely come together — visual quality rivaling Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) and real-time rendering speed.

Why Does It Matter?

Before Gaussian splatting, the dominant approach for photorealistic novel-view synthesis was NeRF. NeRFs are impressive, but they’re slow — rendering a single frame can take seconds, making real-time interactive viewing impractical. Gaussian splatting sidesteps this by representing the scene as an explicit set of primitives that can be rasterized directly onto the screen using fast, GPU-friendly operations.

The result: you can capture a scene with a phone camera, reconstruct it in minutes, and then explore it in real time at high resolution.

Where Is It Going?

The applications are stacking up fast. Virtual and augmented reality experiences can now be populated with true-to-life environments. Film and VFX pipelines are exploring it for digital set extensions and virtual production. E-commerce can let customers inspect products from every angle. And researchers are pushing it further — into dynamic scenes, large-scale outdoor reconstruction, and even editable 3D representations.

Gaussian splatting feels like one of those rare moments when a technique lands that is both simple enough to understand and powerful enough to change what’s possible. The splats are small, but the implications are anything but.