Tsplat
Render Gaussian Splats directly in your terminal
Details
- External ID
- 47762025
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- Tsplat
- Website domain
- github.com
- Launched
- April 14, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 7
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.38817480719794345
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Description
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
Enrichment
- Theme
- lightweight and on-device AI runtimes
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Dev tools
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- terminal renderer for gaussian splats
- Manually corrected
- False
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 — 105 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #72 of 106 (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
- a Rust ray tracer that runs on any GPU · hn · 2025-11-03 · 95 upvotes · similarity 0.50
- Gaussian Splat of a Strawberry · hn · 2026-05-19 · 530 upvotes · similarity 0.50
- Turning a Gaussian Splat into a videogame · hn · 2026-04-23 · 236 upvotes · similarity 0.50
- A short walking sim based on 3DGS that runs in the browser · hn · 2026-07-06 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- SVO Voxelization for Gaussian Splat Collisions · hn · 2026-02-18 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- PyMOL-RS · hn · 2026-02-26 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- Godot and Rust based multiplexer (terminal panes and more) · hn · 2026-09-11 · 97 upvotes · similarity 0.42
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
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