[lifty]

Why can't they make video games with this tech?

[lunaticlabs]

As a video game programmer, I can speak to this. For video games, we generally need geometry. Flat planes, things you can collide against, things we can reason about. Gaussian splats work as a bunch of 2D images stuck on top of each other, that in combination look correct. This is great for rendering, but makes it very very difficult/impossible to figure out whether you are inside some geometry or not, because it doesn't have any. it doesn't give you any way to reason about it as solid geometry. So in the end, you have to create the geometry that is the solid surfaces that you will collide against and move around in, and gaussian splats would be independent of that. Once you have all the geometry, its much easier to just render that.

There are tools that will generate geometry from splats, but its generally not very good, and gives messy results. Fixing the messiness is often more work than just re-doing it from scratch. This is another incredibly difficult problem that hasn't been solved particularly well.

[jncfhnb]

Real world is a shitty map design

[thfuran]

Has anyone sorted out a good way to do dynamic lighting or animation with it?

[meffmadd]

From what I have heard „Bodycam“ uses scans of actual locations for its maps.

[Arun_Kurian]

I think they are coming, should see a few pop up in 2026 for sure.

[deadbabe]

Will be a nightmare to license the use of all this data for commercial purposes. Each house, each building, requires consent.

Sorry, but the answer is no. Unless you are willing to pay.

[carlosjobim]

That's why Hollywood movies are so expensive. When they have a scene with spider man jumping around in New York, they have to pay a fee to every owner of real estate depicted in the scene.

Worst of all is of course space documentaries, where you can see the whole Earth. The licensing fees are horrendous.

[segmondy]

prove it, under what law?