Those tend to move in the wind. Animations don't work well with splats. Or with any data structure except polygon meshes.
Edit:
Responding in the parent because HN says I'm "posting too fast" and should "slow down".
> Have you seen https://www.4dv.ai/
Yeah, but this seems to be just a 3D GS video (captured from several different camera angles), similar to how an ordinary 2D video is just a series of still frames. For 3D games this would be unsuitable since animations often have to be generated on the fly based on game physics. Even for pre-baked animations the memory cost of loading each frame individually would be too inefficient. For polygon meshes you have just a single static mesh that is deformed over time.
> Dreams managed to animate splats on the PS4. Admittedly, not quite the same type of splats, but there is probably a middle ground here where it can be made to work
I'm pretty sure Dreams only allowed animations as translations and rotations, not something that approximates soft skeletal animations. And even translations and rotations would be problematic since 3D GS scenes rely on baked lighting which would then result in objects no longer fitting the scene.
Dreams managed to animate splats on the PS4. Admittedly, not quite the same type of splats, but there is probably a middle ground here where it can be made to work
Alex Evans gave a really great talk about the whole tech stack, the PDF is here: https://www.mediamolecule.com/blog/article/siggraph_2015
For the outdoors examples on that site I can only assume they used dozens of drones?
I have another data point: my ten year old ThinkPad. I get about 10 FPS. Lowering the quality doesn't seem to increase performance.
But I am amazed by what I am seeing, and amazed it runs at all!
I think it won't be long before the whole world is mapped, and "playable".
People already don't want to use VR, why would they get into/allow scanning with even less immediate value?
I agree with the sprit though, I just think rendering the world is gonna happen from a few generations of iteration on world modeling tech like World Labs/Marble.
Mesh processing is a very difficult research domain in computer graphics that has been iterated for several decades, and we still don't have a good automated solution for retopology (Partly because the problem is hard to define in a mathematical way, but also since it's not a problem you can just solve with AI by throwing data and compute at it)
It's a novel approach and worked well in BIM a few years ago, though not anything real-time.
1. extract even a super approximate (meaning, like square edges, with some visual details) mesh from gen ai or a scan as a starting point,
2. move things around and define volumes for gameplay needs,
3. name things ("this is a Victorian house in a surprisingly good condition compared to the neighborhood it's in"), have human guided gen ai polish the things a bit more from the labels within the bounds of the gameplay required volumes,
4. let run time dlss fix the lighting etc from the rough geometry
Gaussian splats are definitely interesting and do something things older tech is not very good at, but at the same time, it's definitely going to end up being a tool in the tool chest and not completely murderating mesh-based tech or something because they have a lot of other weaknesses, like editability. Or dynamic animation.
What I think some people may not realize is, that's not particularly uncommon. There's a really, really long line of graphical techs that do something particularly well but their weaknesses have kept them in a limited use. It's not a problem for Gaussian splats to become a tool in the toolchest; they aren't a "failure" if we're still using meshes for a lot of things in 10 years.
Mesh-type techs are the "default" for some good reasons.