Tsplat
Render Gaussian Splats directly in your terminal
Get picks like this daily. Today's launch numbers, the top launches, AI and tech news, and a daily opportunity pick, straight to your inbox.
Want to reach these readers? Sponsor an issue.
Last 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
HN · launched Apr 14, 2026 · 7 upvotes (top 61%) · 0 views
Niche: developer data and local file viewers · 49 launches, 9 in the last 7 days · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Horizontal
- Dev tools
- Developer
- Not AI
- Hobby / open-source project
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 49 launches in developer data and local file viewers →
Could you build this?
Partial Parsing 3D Gaussian splat files (.ply) and rendering them in a terminal via ANSI escape sequences requires complex mathematical rasterization and low-level graphics math. While an LLM can help with terminal output, writing an efficient 3D rasterizer in software requires real graphics programming competence.
What it would actually take: The stack involves C++, Rust, or Go with SIMD optimizations to read binary PLY splat data, project 3D ellipsoids to 2D screen coordinates, sort them by depth, and rasterize alpha-blended splats directly to an RGB ANSI/half-block terminal buffer. The hard part is optimizing the software projection and sorting pipeline so it renders at interactive framerates entirely in CPU or software compute. Requires graphics engineering expertise and deep knowledge of low-level rendering math.
Discussion
1 comment analyzed.
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 219 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #136 of 220 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 162 days after the earliest competitor.
- Gaussian-Render-Capture · github · 2026-09-23 · 11 upvotes · similarity 0.56
- Radix · hn · 2026-10-29 · 11 upvotes · similarity 0.54
- Blender 5.3 · ph · 2026-11-14 · 109 upvotes · similarity 0.53
- a Rust ray tracer that runs on any GPU · hn · 2025-11-03 · 95 upvotes · similarity 0.51
- Turning a Gaussian Splat into a videogame · hn · 2026-04-23 · 236 upvotes · similarity 0.51
- Gaussian Splat of a Strawberry · hn · 2026-05-19 · 530 upvotes · similarity 0.51
- splat-walk · github · 2026-11-05 · 63 upvotes · similarity 0.48
- gaussian-splat-to-blender-nodes · github · 2026-10-24 · 65 upvotes · similarity 0.48
The niche, labels, vibe code rating and competitor comparison on this page are analysis by Nicheloom. If you use them, please credit nicheloom.com. How you may use our data.