Introducing Viewer’s New APIs

What Does This Mean for Speckle?

We’ve been planning this shift for a while — moving from a single, monolithic Viewer API to a more modular approach. The new Viewer Extensions model will give you a rich library of packages and add-ons to choose from when building your applications.

Limitations of the Current API

The current API was originally built with Speckle’s own frontend needs in mind. This made it less flexible for general-purpose applications and harder to customise or build on top of.

It also only supports Speckle streams as input data, but we’ve seen growing demand for other formats — such as .gltf, .obj, .fbx, and even custom, non-standard data formats.

Customising Viewer Applications

Many of you are already using our Viewer APIs in creative ways — from Urban Decarb tools to interactive visualisation platforms and dynamic dashboards. Speckle’s Viewer library is helping bring these applications to life, but we want to make it even more capable.

Urban Decarb Tool with Henning Larsen

Urban Decarb Tool with Henning Larsen

Introducing Viewer API 2.0

Viewer API 2.0 changes how you work with Viewer as a library by introducing multiple API layers. Instead of one big API, it’s now split into a core Viewer and extensions, giving you more customisation options and freedom to work the way you want.

You can:

• Extend existing stock extensions.
• Create your own custom extensions.
• Load any input data format using your own loaders and converters.

Viewer will still look and feel the same — but now it’s far more adaptable for your projects.

In short, Viewer API 2.0 is made of:

• Viewer Core – handles the fundamental workings of the Viewer and provides a base API.
• Viewer Extensions – add specific features, built on top of Viewer Core, each with their own APIs.