The news is not that 4Dviews added Gaussian splatting. It is that a captured human can enter a Unity real-time scene without a conversion step, and close-up meshes and mid-distance splats stop being a one-time choice.
At AWE USA 2026, held June 15 to 18 at the Long Beach Convention Center, 4Dviews showed a new Unity plug-in at booth #935. It lets the company's HOLOSYS Splat software export PLY and SPZ Gaussian-splat files directly into Unity, creating a dual pipeline that carries both mesh-and-texture and Gaussian-splat workflows. The system exports three formats, 4DS for mesh and textures plus SPZ and PLY, and supports both offline playback and real-time rendering. 4Dviews recommends mesh and textures for close shots and Gaussian splats for medium-distance viewing, citing better capture of hair, fur, and reflective and translucent materials.
The real signal is not that another vendor adopted Gaussian splatting. It is that a captured performance can now enter a real-time engine without a conversion detour, and that the old trade-off, clean geometry or convincing hair, becomes a per-shot decision inside one project. The cost that dropped is pipeline friction, the hours normally spent moving a volumetric asset between tools before it renders.
What a producer can do now
Until now, dropping a real captured human into a Unity experience meant a chain of exports, conversions and cleanup before anything played back. A direct export path collapses that. A producer can hand a captured performer to a Unity team the way they already hand over a model, then choose meshes for the moments the audience gets close and splats for the wider shots where hair and translucency sell the realism. That is two looks from one capture, decided per shot rather than locked at capture time.
Why splats and meshes both matter
Gaussian splats are strong at exactly the things polygon meshes struggle with, the soft edges of hair and fur, reflections and translucent surfaces, at medium viewing distance. Meshes still win up close, where silhouette and contact matter. Keeping both in one project means you stop betting a whole activation on a single representation. Paired with real-time rendering on the playback side, the same captured performance can hold up on an LED wall, a headset and a phone without a separate asset build for each.
Why this belongs in an experiential toolkit
Volumetric capture has always promised a real person you can walk around. The blocker was rarely the capture, it was everything after it, the fragile handoff into the engine that actually runs the show. A direct-to-Unity path with two complementary representations makes captured humans a practical building block for activations, not a research demo. For producers, that means a talent likeness or a live performance can become a reusable, engine-ready asset instead of a one-off render.
That is the layer we assemble. SensaLab is the white-label real-time 3D and immersive layer agencies and brands use to design and run experiences under their own name, and a clean capture-to-engine path is exactly the plumbing that keeps a live show looking like the pitch.