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Comment by ziofill | Hacker News Reader

What are the “consumer” applications of 3D splatting? It looks super cool, and I can see applications for the next gen of maps, but I don’t understand if it’s going to be an end user technology or not.

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do you mean something that end users are aware of using? probably not. but probably everything end-users do that involves digital models of three-dimensional objects will use gaussian splatting fairly soon: cad, cam, photography, maps, video games, surgery, georectification of satellite images, diagnostic radiography, ultrasound, radar, sonar, animation, missile guidance, other robotics applications, fashion design, 3-d printing, etc.

It might end up being used in video games, either because the performance continues pushing ahead, or because someone just wants its distinctive look.

Speaking of uses for gaussian splatting - would anyone have any unique use cases for being able to generate splat models wildly faster?

Yeah, there are some applications in the area of SLAM that benefit from quickly generating plausible gaussian representations.

It's very unlikely it will be used in video games. Video games pretty much exclusively use texture mapped polygon meshes as data structure. They easy to render, they plays well with object animations, they allow for dynamic lights, and there exists a lot of mature software to create and edit this data. 3D Gaussian splats also render quite fast, but they are bad for animations, they don't allow for dynamic lights (as far as I can tell), and there are basically no tools to create and edit models, except from photogrammetry.

Probably about as consumer-related as any other part of a 3d rendering pipeline. Most 3D rendered images you see-- VFX, motion graphics, animation-- were rendered and composited into video clips. Some things like video games render 3D in real time.

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