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SOG File Viewer Online

Preview .sog compressed Gaussian Splatting scenes in your browser — PlayCanvas SOG format, full quality, no upload.

Last updated Mar 2026

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What You Should Know

What Is the SOG Format?

SOG (Sorted and Organized Gaussians) is a compressed 3DGS format created by PlayCanvas. It achieves up to 95% size reduction over raw PLY by combining Morton spatial ordering, WebP-compressed attribute textures, and k-means codebook quantization. A 1 GB PLY file typically compresses to around 42 MB in SOG. The format is open source (MIT license) and designed specifically for fast web delivery — the compressed data decodes directly into GPU-ready textures without an intermediate decompression step.

SOG vs SPZ: Which Compressed Format to Use?

SOG and SPZ are both compressed 3DGS formats, but they take different approaches. SPZ (Niantic) uses scalar quantization + gzip, achieving about 90% compression. SOG uses visual compression (WebP textures + codebook quantization), achieving up to 95% compression for scenes with full spherical harmonics — roughly 2x smaller than SPZ for high-SH content (the gap is narrower for SH0-only files). SOG is optimized for web delivery speed (GPU-ready decoding), while SPZ is more widely supported across tools. Choose SOG for web deployment where file size matters most; choose SPZ for compatibility with Scaniverse and the Khronos ecosystem.

How SOG Compression Works

SOG first sorts all Gaussians into Morton (Z-curve) spatial order, which ensures nearby Gaussians in 3D space are stored adjacently. The Gaussian attributes (positions, scales, rotations, colors, SH coefficients) are then arranged into 2D textures and compressed with WebP image compression. Scale and color values are further quantized using k-means codebooks, where cluster centroids are stored in lookup tables and each Gaussian stores only a codebook index. At load time, the WebP textures are decoded by the browser's built-in WebP decoder and uploaded directly to the GPU as textures — no JavaScript decompression loop needed.

Creating SOG Files

SOG files are created using the PlayCanvas splat-transform CLI tool (npm install -g @playcanvas/splat-transform) or the SuperSplat browser editor. The splat-transform tool accepts PLY, SPLAT, SPZ, and KSPLAT inputs and outputs .sog files. SuperSplat can export scenes directly to SOG from its editor interface. Both tools are MIT licensed and free to use.

Frequently Asked Questions
SOG files are created by the PlayCanvas splat-transform CLI tool and the SuperSplat browser editor. Both are free and MIT licensed. splat-transform accepts PLY, SPLAT, SPZ, and KSPLAT inputs.
For web delivery, SOG is typically 2x smaller than SPZ for the same scene, with comparable visual quality. SOG also decodes faster because the WebP textures upload directly to the GPU. However, SPZ has broader tool support and is aligned with the Khronos glTF ecosystem. Use SOG for web publishing, SPZ for tool interoperability.
Yes. Use our SOG to PLY converter or the splat-transform CLI. The conversion preserves all Gaussians, though there may be minor precision differences from the codebook quantization applied during SOG compression.
Yes. SOG stores SH coefficients up to degree 3 using codebook-compressed textures. View-dependent color effects are fully preserved. This viewer renders SOG with complete SH data.
A scene stored as PLY (500 MB) costs roughly $0.05/download in bandwidth. The same scene as SOG (~25 MB) costs ~$0.0025/download — 20x less. For high-traffic 3DGS galleries, SOG can reduce hosting costs by over 95%.

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