Plays decently smooth on my M4 Max. It's probably still a long way from being a production-ready replacement for meshed environments, but I could imagine a hybrid mode where certain elements like grass and shrubbery are drawn with gaussians, perhaps with support for basic procedural animation. Great work with the playable demo!
For me, the biggest issue this solves is the blank canvas paralysis problem. Artists are visual thinkers and need a little nudge in the right (art) direction. This is a great way to fill that blank sheet of paper with something that they can take and run with.
Editing Gaussian Splats is still a pain in the ass in the artist's perspective. Even if you can create a good-enough first try using scanned data or generative AI, you just end up with a rough draft that you cannot polish in any way. Existing mesh-based tools allow you to edit the geometry relatively easily, since they are in a higher level discrete representation rather than just a point cloud data structure.
There’s some movement in this area to be able to surface quantize the splats but you are right, right now it’s simply just visual language and isn’t useful in the pipeline.
dynamic objects are still largely unsolved problem, I just tried to approach it in this demo. also this particular place doesn't have reflective surfaces, but technology supports it - check for example this splat https://superspl.at/scene/ff1d0393 or this one https://superspl.at/scene/6c822f84
I'm looking forward to seeing what will happen when gaussian splatting can be combined with DLSS 5. Gaussian splatting has a lot of potential in video games yet to be realised.
This for some reason reminded me of the "Killerspiele" debate [1] we had in Germany after a dramatic school shooting. The shooter had previously built a map of the school in Counter-Strike. With this it's not a long stretch from there to having a realistic map of a school... Which would have given him a better rating than the one he got for his map: "I'd like to see the school that actually has lighting like this." [2]
Hopefully this tech will never used for something like this.
Those tend to move in the wind. Animations don't work well with splats. Or with any data structure except polygon meshes.
It has no dynamic lighting or effects, which makes the video look like a high quality game from 2006.
[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killerspiel [2] https://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/web/schuelerhobby-mapping-me...