Reminds me of Ecstatica [1], a 1994 game that had intense visuals with a very odd/different rendering engine made of 3D ellipsoids; in a way really crude splats in gouraud shading.
1. Gaussian Splats are very expensive to render. They capture a lot of detail which makes them seem cheaper than an equivalent raster render of that quality, but they wouldn't meet real time AAA game performance requirements
2. Gaussian Splats don't have a concrete surface. Want to cast shadows or do physics? It's doable but very tricky. Want to relight them? Also tricky. What is the exact surface point that you want to affect or sample for any particular operation? Deformations also become very difficult to do well.
3. Gaussian Splats are not sharp. You can get sharper with different kernel types or higher density of points, but your costs go up as well.
4. Gaussian splats are awful for any kind of path tracing. You can do it but you go back to the issues above. So mixing and matching traditional content with splats becomes a performance bottleneck.
I don't think you'll see a AAA game use splats for more than something like cinematics in the near term.
I know nothing about the technology but the alternative is creating a 3d model of my living room which is also outside my skill-set.
Yes, its what the autonomous car people are doing.
However you might want to do photogrammetry first (https://github.com/alicevision/meshroom opensource) as that produces a mesh which you can use to detect collisions easier. The downside is that transparent objects render really badly. but it is a lot faster to render
For training you can do a hybrid geometry plus splats workflow. Have geometry that you can constantly raycast against and have as an input to your vision training or to get accurate depth buffers.
The workflow for splats and photogrammetry are very similar.
The contributions of 3DGS lie in how fast you can make them in modern GPU hardware (tiling + sorting with threads), and how to make the pipeline differentiable so that you can fit the Gaussian splats with photogrammetry data. Similar to the history of deep learning, it became technically feasible once the GPU hardware was powerful enough.
People have also converted some small sections of Unreal 5 demos into splats https://superspl.at/scene/692c4f91
Or perhaps use a real world scan - it was suggested this one would make an ideal setting for zombies https://superspl.at/scene/6359774f
Vanilla 3DGS cannot do any specular lighting or reflections - the color is basically baked in the splats. There's some active research going on to create richer Gaussian splats so we can do shading (or even ray tracing on it) - but haven't seen anyone using in production yet.
If you mean the technique of splatting specifically, Dreams for PS4 [1] is prior art.
If you mean pre-rendering, there's Myst and games like the original FF7 for PS1.
> The game does not actually model three-dimensional volumes of voxels. Instead, it models the ground as a surface, which may be seen as being made up of voxels. The ground is decorated with objects that are modeled using texture-mapped polygons. When Outcast was developed, the term "voxel engine", when applied to video games, commonly referred to a ray casting engine (for example the Voxel Space engine). On the engine technology page of the game's website, the landscape engine is also referred to as the "Voxels engine". The engine is purely software based; it does not rely on hardware-acceleration via a 3D graphics card.
Its honestly really very hard to work with this stuff because you ultimately need to be able to meshes inside these scenes triangle seas and you need to do it in a way that plausibly fits in the world. You can't have unlit characters walking around a baked lit scene and have them fit in. That's just from a visual design perspective.
You also always want to have bounce light from your dynamic things onto the baked scene and depending on the tech, you might not even be able to spatially place a dynamic thing and have it properly occlude what splats it needs to occlude.
As is, its a niche technology for games. That might change one day.
https://github.com/googlevr/seurat https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pf5Q3bvXj8E
Both can be done locally or on cloud? the comparison point becomes moot if you change the parameters that drastically