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Comment by SomaticPirate | Hacker News Reader

This video might help explain 3D Gaussian splatting. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKgMxrWcW1s Essentially, an entirely new graphics pipeline with different fundamental techniques which allow for high performance and fidelity compared to... what we did before(?) Cool.

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Not quite, it’s just a way to assign a color value to a point in space (think point clouds) based on photogrammetry. It’s voxels on steroids but still is drawn using the same techniques. It’s the magic of creating the splats that’s interesting.

A color value for each point is a good starting place to gain an intuition. Some readers might be interested to know that the color is not constant for each point, but instead dependent on viewing angle. That is part of what allows splats to look realistic. Real objects have some degree of specularity which makes them take on slightly different shades as you move your head.

And since we normally see with binocular vision, a stereoscopic view adds another layer of realism you wouldn't normally perceive otherwise. Each eye sees subsurface scattering differently and integrates in your head.

That video didn’t explain what Gaussian splatting is at all, but I did get a minute ad read for some cloud GPU service.

https://packet39.com/blog/a-primer-on-gaussian-splats/ is much better (don't load on mobile though, lots of data).

Sorry but this is a horrible video. The guy just spews superlatives in an annoying voice until 4:30 (of a 6 minute video mind you), when he finally gives a 10 second "explanation" of Gaussian splatting, which doesn't really explain anything, then jumps to a sponsored ad.

yeah... their older videos are a bit more useful from what I remember (more time spent on the research paper content, etc), but they've become so content-free that I just block the channel outright nowadays. it's the "this changes everything (every time, every day)" hype-channel for graphics.

The same graphics pipeline is used: rasterization.

Rasterization is a very general term. There is a big difference in practice between the traditional rasterization pipeline and splat rasterizers

it's kinda like saying "we still show pixels". true but almost totally useless for understanding anything.

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