What’s the story?
Niantic Spatial has released SPZ 4, an updated open-source file format for 3D Gaussian splats that compresses faster, handles bigger scenes, and supports custom vendor extensions.
Why it matters
SPZ 4 makes Gaussian splats faster to process and easier to scale, lowering the barrier for developers building 3D content for XR, web, robotics, and creative tools.
The bigger picture
SPZ 4 arrives as Gaussian splats move from research demos into mainstream creative and XR pipelines, where a common, scalable file format is becoming essential infrastructure.
In General XR News
May 11, 2026 – Spatial computing technology company Niantic Spatial has recently announced the release of SPZ 4, the latest version of its open-source file format for 3D Gaussian splats. According to the company, the new version is designed to handle significantly larger and more demanding datasets while preserving the core design principles of earlier releases.
What is SPZ and why does it exist?
SPZ was originally open-sourced by Niantic in late 2024 and described by the company as a “JPG for 3D Gaussian splats” (a single, compact format) that made splats roughly 10x smaller than PLY files and easier to share across platforms. The company stated that Adobe Photoshop users alone have created roughly 800,000 SPZ files in the last two months, and that the format is now deployed across web environments, real-time engines, robotics pipelines, and mobile platforms.
How does SPZ 4 improve on previous versions?
Niantic stated that SPZ 4 compresses about 3-5x faster, loads roughly 1.5-2x faster end-to-end, and still produces files 10x smaller than uncompressed PLYs. The company noted that the original SPZ packaged the entire file into a single compressed stream (using a method called GZip), which meant only one part of a computer’s processor (a single CPU core) could handle compression at a time, slowing things down on larger captures.
SPZ 4 replaces this with six parallel streams using a compression method called ZSTD, with each stream handling a different part of the splat data (positions, colors, scales, rotations, alphas, and spherical harmonics) so that multiple processor cores can work on the file simultaneously. For context, Steam’s April 2026 hardware survey shows 6-core CPUs as the most common Windows gaming PC setup at about 29.5%, followed by 4-core CPUs at about 12.4%.
The SPZ 4 format also removes the previous 10-million-point limit on the number of individual splat points (the small 3D building blocks that make up a Gaussian splat scene) per file, now supporting captures with tens of millions of points.
Additional changes include a plaintext 32-byte file header placed at the start of every file, allowing tools to inspect basic file information without having to unpack the compressed contents first. SPZ 4 also introduces a vendor extension system, which according to Niantic allows companies to add their own custom metadata or attributes to SPZ 4 files while letting compatible tools safely skip extensions they do not recognize. The first extension comes from Adobe, covering recommended camera bounds for orbit-style viewers.
What does SPZ 4 mean for developers?
According to the company, SPZ 4 raises the ceiling on splat quality while giving developers room to choose where on the quality curve they want to sit, with configurable spherical harmonics quantization (which controls how much detail is preserved in view-dependent lighting and reflection data) and added support for SH degree 4 (allowing more detailed effects like glossy highlights than earlier versions could handle).
Niantic stated that Adobe has made SPZ “central to its 3D toolchain,” including Photoshop’s Rotate Object feature, and has extended SPZ support in Babylon.js for web-based 3D pipelines.
Where can developers access SPZ 4?
SPZ 4 is available now via Niantic’s open-source GitHub repository, alongside a browser-based tool at nianticspatial.com/spz-converter that uses WebAssembly (WASM) to inspect and convert splat files locally on the user’s machine, without uploading anything to a server. For more information on Niantic Spatial and SPZ 4, please visit the company’s website.
Image credit: Niantic Spatial
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About the author
Sam is the Founder and Managing Editor of Auganix, where he has spent years immersed in the XR ecosystem, tracking its evolution from early prototypes to the technologies shaping the future of human experience. While primarily covering the latest AR and VR news, his interests extend to the wider world of human augmentation, from AI and robotics to haptics, wearables, and brain–computer interfaces.