Gaussian splatting is a fancy word for pointcloud but with coloured shapes instead of points.

Its been around for ages, but It was never used because if you have a million points in a point cloud, you'd need to artistically manipulate a million points.

Its like 3d hair, its pretty simple, just render a billion hairs, but in practice its hard to make it look good.

Here we tell a machine learning model to adjust the angle, colour, shape and size of a million primitives (ie a square, circle, triangle etc.) so that it looks like a the photos we provide.