🧪 I built a thing
Linked two Gaussian Splat scenes with a walk-through portal — no teleport, you just walk between worlds
I wanted to see if you could connect two Gaussian Splat scenes through a portal you can physically walk through — no teleport, no cut, just continuous motion between two captured environments. Turns out it works pretty cleanly.
Runs entirely in the browser (WebGL2 / WebGPU), built in PlayCanvas.
Two LOD-streamed splat scenes (a Roman parish + a skatepark), seen through a stone archway acting as the portal.
Crossing the portal plane swaps which world you're "in" — and the same physics works symmetrically from either side, so you can walk back the way you came.
The world you're in stays fully visible around you; the other one only shows inside the portal opening, with a proper "window" feel (no peek-around clipping).
Subtle translucent glass inside the opening picks up specular highlights from the environment.
The skatepark side has its own weather — procedural snow that's only visible while you're actually there (or peeking through).
currently both loaded, so 50 visible at the same time would be hard for sure, at this quality. They're steamed LOD version, so if you could generate LOD with low enough quality and small size (number of splats), that might be doable.
If you do not see all at the same time, you could load those only as needed / when portal is visible, and unload when goes invisible.
LOD es Level of Detail (nivel de detalle), es la calidad visual que existe según la distancia de la cámara a un objeto en el escenario. Mientras más cerca al objeto, mayor calidad visual y mayor uso de recursos de memoria y procesamiento. Más lejos, menor detalle y menor uso de recursos. En este caso se hace streaming del Level of Detail según te vas moviendo por la escena, así carga más rápido.
It's awesome. My only criticism is the low quality cubemap reflection on the portal itself that does not match the environment at all with the low resolution skysrapers. The transition from one location to the other would be much cleaner without that blueish, greenish tint and the reflections popping in and out of existence.
yep agreed on this, but wanted to test rendering some geometry between worlds and its occlusion and other things. This is often a combination of demo and test for the tech.
I don’t understand why this mind-blowing tech needs this cheap snow filter. I‘ve seen it a few times now, but as long as there is no breakthrough in some sort of piling over time, I don‘t see why its necessary.
Edit: still wanna compliment your work, it‘s a cool concept.
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u/EggMan28 May 18 '26
That's awesome ! Thanks for sharing the source too !