Integrate Marble world pano/splat + GLB collider and extend splat/world discovery

[alexwelcing]

Motivation

• Provide a default remote 3D world (Marble) with an associated panoramic image and Gaussian splat so the 360 experience has a rich remote entry point.
• Add physical collision geometry so the 3D world can be used with the physics environment and interactions.
• Support additional Gaussian splat formats and wire remote assets into existing discovery flows for a smoother authoring and loading experience.
• Improve background rendering control and axis handling to allow layered pano+splat rendering without visual or physics mismatches.

Description

• Added lib/worlds/marbleWorld.ts and wired the Marble pano/splat defaults into ThreeSixty so the scene loads the remote world by default via onChangeImage and selects appropriate splat variants.
• Implemented components/3d/scene/WorldCollider.tsx which loads a GLB, merges mesh geometries, and creates a trimesh collider via useTrimesh for physics.
• Updated Gaussian splat and sphere background components to accept axis-aware scaling and new render flags by changing GaussianSplatBackground to normalize array scales and BackgroundSphere to accept radius, renderOrder, and depthWrite.
• Extended discovery and API surfaces to include the Marble world and .spz files by updating /pages/api/backgrounds.ts to inject the world entry and /pages/api/getSplats.ts to detect .spz, and propagated the world type across UI components (tablet, gallery, terminal, scene gallery, world tracker).

Testing

• Started the dev server with pnpm dev --hostname 0.0.0.0 --port 3000 and the application compiled and served pages successfully.
• Exercised APIs and observed 200 responses for background and article endpoints including /api/backgroundImages, /api/backgrounds, and /api/articles-enhanced.
• Executed an automated Playwright script to load / and capture a screenshot (artifacts/marble-world.png) showing the Marble world landing view.
• No unit test files were added in this change set; manual/automated runtime checks above succeeded.

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Codex Task

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Project	Deployment	Review	Updated (UTC)
next-docs-search	Error		Jan 11, 2026 7:50pm

[chatgpt-codex-connector]

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[chatgpt-codex-connector]

Avoid reinitializing the splat viewer on every render

Because the useEffect depends on position/rotation arrays (which are recreated each render when passed as inline literals or defaults), and the previous loadedRef guard was removed, any parent re-render now disposes and rebuilds the Gaussian Splat viewer. This will repeatedly reload the splat when state updates occur (e.g., game timer changes), causing flicker and heavy CPU/network churn. Consider memoizing position/rotation or restoring a guard so the viewer only recreates when the splat URL or scale actually changes.

Useful? React with 👍 / 👎.

[chatgpt-codex-connector]

Preserve 3D world assets when selecting a world

When a world is selected from the gallery, the scenery object often only includes path/type (because /api/backgrounds injects the Marble world without splatUrl/colliderUrl). In that case this branch explicitly disables splats and clears the collider, so re-selecting the Marble world from the terminal gallery downgrades it to a flat pano and drops physics. Either include the splat/collider URLs in the world entry or avoid clearing them when the world selection is missing those fields.

Useful? React with 👍 / 👎.