Our CPO Will McDonald recently shared his perspective on 3D streaming infrastructure in POST Magazine and TVBEurope's 2026 industry outlook. His observations reflect the problem we're building Miris to solve: the barrier to creating high-fidelity 3D is falling faster than anyone expected, and distribution infrastructure hasn't kept pace. That gap is about to close.

The creation problem is largely solved

The biggest shift in 2025 was how quickly generative AI pushed beyond static NeRFs and traditional reconstruction into fast, view-consistent 3D generation. As Will noted in TVBEurope, "My ten-year-old can generate 3D assets that would have required a skilled team not long ago." Content creators now stitch together workflows using GenAI and world models to produce usable 3D content with an ever-smaller number of inputs. The processes that once required multi-view capture, retopology, or hand-authored LODs are collapsing.

For decades, creating compelling 3D required highly-trained teams working in digital content creation tools. That's changing. Generative AI now produces usable 3D assets from text prompts or a handful of images, while capture pipelines are turning photos and video into dense radiance fields and Gaussian splats that can reach production quality. The barrier to creation is dropping, and the volume of content is rising.
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Distribution is the bottleneck

Distribution has not kept pace. Today, most realtime 3D on the web runs through polygonal formats like glTF. These formats do not inherently require simplification, but in practice, developers aggressively decimate meshes, compress textures, and standardize lighting to fit within device and bandwidth budgets. The result is a look many brands recognize: physically-based materials that still read as plasticky, generic reflections, and hero products that do not match their high-end renders.

The alternative, pixel streaming from cloud GPUs, works well for demos and small events but breaks down economically at internet scale. At 100,000 active users, you are paying for a stadium of GPUs (assuming you can secure them in the first place) and an enormous amount of video bandwidth. That is not a sustainable way to power everyday shopping or entertainment.

The path forward: stream the scene, render locally

The path forward is to stream compact field representations directly to devices and render locally. Instead of pushing a fixed sequence of pixels, you distribute a compressed scene that can be cached at the cloud edge while phones, headsets, and laptops sample it from arbitrary viewpoints in realtime. At bitrates that are competitive with high-quality video, you trade a single camera path for fully interactive viewpoints without renting a cloud GPU for every viewer.

This shifts the framing for studios and brands. High-fidelity immersive 3D used to imply expensive pixel streaming or deploying apps, both of which carried prohibitive GPU and distribution costs at scale for web delivery. Remove those barriers around cost, speed, fidelity, and scale, and the question changes from "what tradeoff do I need to make to reach consumers" to "what new experiences become viable when distribution and runtime cost are no longer the limiting factors."
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What 2026 looks like

Will expects 2026 to be the first year we can reliably distribute interactive, high-quality 3D across a wide range of devices, including low-power ones, without resorting to pixel streaming. Better attribute compression, adaptive fidelity, and hardware-accelerated field decoding will make volumetric playback stable at consumer scale.

Hard problems remain: real-time editability, temporal coherence for dynamic scenes, and reducing end-to-end AI conditioning time. We'll see clear progress on all three this year.

2026 will not finish this stack, but it will meet expectations. As radiance fields, splats, and AI-assisted asset generation become normal, teams will stop asking whether today's web 3D and pixel streaming are "good enough" and start treating volumetric streaming as a first-class medium. The networks stay the same. What we send over them will change.

History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes. When video creation democratized, it reshaped distribution: YouTube, streaming platforms, and global CDNs emerged because millions of people could suddenly make content. We're entering the same moment in 3D. When billions of people can create 3D content, current distribution models cannot hold. Storage footprints, bandwidth budgets, moderation, and engine tooling all break under that volume.

2026 is when those pressures become impossible to ignore.