Pardon our dust: "images" is a bad name for what's being loaded. Past versions of this approach (MERF) stored feature vectors in PNG images. We replace them with binary arrays. Unfortunately, all such arrays need to be loaded before the first frame can be rendered.

You do however point out one weakness of SMERF: large payload sizes. If we can figure out how to compress them by 10x, it'll be a very different experience!