[eloop]

Splatting for volume rendering is quite old - Westover, Lee Alan (July 1991). "SPLATTING: A Parallel, Feed-Forward Volume Rendering Algorithm"

[andybak]

Are you saying there's nothing new in this or that it's building on an already established approach? I think the latter is not something anyone is trying to hide - while the former doesn't seem correct.

[corysama]

What’s new in the paper is the technique to generate the gaussians from photos. The output that is used to render uses a technique that is a decade or three old, but not terribly practical until recently.

For me, a rendering guy, that’s great! The data used at render time is very simple and flexible. Simpler than triangles even when you get into non-trivial operations.

[mikhailfranco]

Yes, I used to think of it as throw Gaussian snowballs at the window and see what sticks.

P.S. Not sure where the insight came from, but I was living near Boston at the time, and had young children :)

[nsajko]

Yeah, it seems like the authors of the new paper may have missed much relevant existing research?

[tayistay]

They haven't. You can't get a paper into SIGGRAPH that misses relevant existing research.