Show HN: Real-Time Gaussian Splatting

This is getting unreal. They're becoming fast and high fidelity. Once we get better editing capabilities and can shape the Gaussian fields, this will become the prevailing means of creating and distributing media.

Turning any source into something 4D volumetric that you can easily mold as clay, relight, reshape. A fully interactable and playable 4D canvas.

Imagine if the work being done with diffusion models could read and write from Gaussian fields instead of just pixels. It could look like anything: real life, Ghibli, Pixar, whatever.

I can't imagine where this tech will be in five years.

Could you or someone else wise in the ways of graphics give me a layperson's rundown of how this works, why it's considered so important, and what the technical challenges are given that an RGB+D(epth?) stream is the input?

Usually creating a Gaussian splat representation takes a long time and uses an iterative gradient-based optimization procedure. Using RGBD helps me sidestep this optimization, as much of the geometry is already present in the depth channel and so it enables the real-time aspect of my technique.

When you say "big deal", I imagine you are also asking about business or societal implications. I can't really speak on those, but I'm open to licensing this IP to any companies which know about big business applications :)