Tortuise

Gaussian splats in your terminal. Yes, made of symbols.

There was this funny little itch: 3D Gaussian Splatting is beautiful, but the whole thing usually wants a GPU window, a browser, or some proper graphics stack standing nearby with a serious face.

And I kept looking at terminal UIs, at ratatui, at half-block characters, at the weird amount of visual bandwidth still hiding inside ANSI escape codes, and thinking: wait. Why exactly can this not be a real renderer?

So Tortuise became the answer: a CPU-first 3D Gaussian Splatting viewer written in Rust, built on crossterm and parallelized with rayon. It loads standard `.ply` and `.splat` scenes, projects and sorts the Gaussians, rasterizes them into a framebuffer, then encodes the result back into terminal characters.

The main trick is halfblock rendering: one terminal cell becomes two vertical pixels by pairing foreground and background colors. Silly little Unicode hack. Extremely useful. Suddenly a terminal stops being just logs and shell prompts, and starts behaving like a constrained little viewport into real 3D space.

Current state: six render modes, free and orbit camera modes, built-in demo scenes, SuperSplat download tooling, truecolor detection, 256-color fallback, and real 1.1M-splat scenes running without a GPU. Works on potato. Which is always a beautiful benchmark category.

It shipped as a Rust crate, got a public repo, and somehow became a tiny proof that terminal-native artifacts can still be genuinely strange, useful, and pretty.

Next natural directions are higher-resolution Kitty graphics output, SHARP image-to-splat flow, better scene bundles, and possibly using Tortuise as a small visual substrate for other spatial tools. Not a browser replacement. More like a terminal-native inspection layer for worlds that should not need to leave the working surface.

Repo: buildoak/tortuise.

P.S. Yes, it is Tortuise. Ratatui plus tortoise. The name is doing exactly what it is supposed to do.