3D content is quickly becoming the default language of digital interaction. It’s how we explore virtual spaces, try on products, collect art, and build immersive games. But this rapid growth brings a familiar challenge: protecting digital assets in a world where copying is easy and attribution is often lost.

Existing protections—like DRM, file obfuscation, or blockchain tags—offer partial solutions. They manage access or prove provenance, but they don’t embed authorship into the asset itself. That’s where watermarking comes in.

This series explores GuardSplat, a new approach designed to tackle the watermarking problem in one of the most promising rendering paradigms today: 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS). Based on the paper GuardSplat: Robust and Efficient Watermarking for 3D Gaussian Splatting by Zixuan Chen, Guangcong Wang, Jiahao Zhu, Jianhuang Lai, and Xiaohua Xie (arXiv:2411.19895), the framework introduces a way to embed robust, invisible signals directly into 3DGS models—without sacrificing speed or visual quality.

This four-part series covers:

1. Why watermarking 3D assets matters: The rise of 3D content, the risks of unprotected models, and where current protections fall short.

2. What 3D Gaussian Splatting is: A deep dive into the rendering technique that’s reshaping real-time 3D graphics.

3. How GuardSplat works: A breakdown of the method—how it embeds, protects, and persists through 3DGS.

4. What this means for the future: Implications for creators, platforms, and the broader ecosystem of spatial media.

Start here:
GuardSplat Demystified, Part 1: Why protect 3D assets?

In Part 1, we zoom out and look at the current landscape—how 3D assets are used across industries, what makes them so vulnerable, and how existing protection tools compare.

Let’s begin.