About
A free collection of 3D Gaussian splats that runs in your browser.
Who makes it
Splashery is made by Ryan Kamp. 3D Gaussian splats make stunning scans of real things, but they are usually something you only watch. Splashery asks what happens if you can play with them.
Needs Ryan's words: The maker's line and why this exists, in his own voice.
What it is
Every Splash is drawn with 3D Gaussian splats: soft, colored blobs that together make a capture of a real thing, or a shape built from a recipe. There are 460 Splashes on 29 shelves today, from captures to atoms, planets, math, and games, plus tools that turn your own photos, pages, and sounds into splats.
You can poke, paint, blow on, drop, and dissolve them, then share one as a link, an embed, a GIF, or a video. It is plain web pages and code, with no app to install and no account.
What a splat is explains the idea, with live demos.
The pile
The home page stacks every Splash that has a real size on top of something bigger, at its true size: 374 of them, from 200 pm (Atom) to 100 thousand light-years (Spiral Galaxy). It's one picture, and you only ever see a small part of it. Above the smallest Splash sits a proton, and under the biggest, everything anyone can see; those two are drawings, not Splashes.
The 86 Splashes with no size, such as math, games, and tools, aren't on it. They're on a page of their own.
Each size is the longest side of the real thing the Splash shows: a bus is long, a tower is tall, a planet is across. It was set twice, separately, from the Splash's own words where it gives a length, from a measured figure for a real named thing, or as a typical size for a kind of thing. 317 of the two agreed within a quarter, and 29 more within 60 percent. The 28 that disagreed further were settled by looking at what the picture shows. Each Splash's page says what its size rests on.
Your screen's width is worked out from the kind of device it is. Phones are alike enough that "life size" is right to within about a tenth; on a computer it's a guess, and the pile says "about."
The one thing on the pile that isn't to scale is at the very bottom. You'll know it when you see it.
Offline
The Playground keeps each Splash you open on your device, so it opens again with no connection, up to 1 GB of Splashes. Past that, the one you opened longest ago goes first. You can install the Playground from your browser to keep it in your Dock or on your Home Screen.
The rest of this site, The Splash Manual, and a Splash you haven't opened need a connection.
What it promises
- Nothing you open leaves your device. Files, photos, pages, and songs are turned into splats in your browser. Privacy has the details.
- Everything is credited. Every capture, picture, sound, and dataset is credited beside its Splash and on the credits page. Where a maker's name or logo was painted over, the credit says so, and How marks are painted over shows how.
- No tracking, no cookies, no ads.
- Old links keep working. A Splash you shared last month still opens.
The small print
The code is under the MIT license, and each Splash's assets keep their own licenses. See Credits, How to cite, Privacy, Terms, and Contact.