Ruben Fro is doing some cool stuff with animated gaussian splats: https://twitter.com/Ruben_Fro

Think of them as point clouds + lighting. Relighting is viable. Procedural deformation is viable. Animation is just a case of transforming sub-groupings.

Collisions might be a bit trickier but you can always derive a low-res collision mesh from the input data and use that as a proxy.

It's early days at the moment and people are still exploring the possibilities.

Just a shower thought so to speak, but could you combine this technique with something similar to precomputed radiance transfer[1]?

You'd have to take multiple pictures of the scene, then move some light source around, take another set of pictures etc. And in a similar sense to the irradiance volumes[1], instead of encoding just the gaussian parameters, encode them using something that lets you reconstruct the gaussian parameters based on the position of the primary light source for example. I know estimating light position and such from images has been worked on for image-based BRDF extraction for a long time[2].

Of course it'll require a lot more images and compute, but that's the nature of the dynamic beast.

Again not really thought this through and it's not really my field, though I was into physically-based rendering a decade ago. Just seems like this is something that seems like it would be solved by natural progression in a not too distant future.

[1]: https://chrisoat.com/papers/Oat_GDC2005_IrradianceVolumesFor...

[2]: https://graphics.stanford.edu/~lensch/Papers/TOG03BRDF.pdf (random example)

The problem with "unlimited detail" wasn't that it was static (the majority of any game's environment are), it's that it was using voxels which can't really compete with triangles when it comes to a quality-perf trade-off. They could render massive data sets, but not with a quality that is needed for games. Voxel-based data sets tend to require a whole lot of memory, whereas triangle-based data sets can cheaply "fake" higher details with textures. The blockiness of voxels is also a huge issue for anything that's not an axis-aligned-bounding-box, and to fix that you have to invest so much GPU resources, you might as well go back to textured triangles.

I wouldn't be surprised if gaussian splats make it into AAA games, though. Not as the main rendering primitive, but for specific things like vegetation where they really kick ass.

It’s more of a reconstruction technique than rendering technique. But the power is the 3D differentiable renderer. That means we can optimize an output image to look exactly as we want - given sufficient input data. If you want to learn more take a look at differentiable rendering and 3D multiview reconstruction.

Euclideon's method probably uses fine-grained acceleration structures and LoDs that are too expensive to rebuild in real-time. At least, that's how I took it.

There's hype, over-hype and then there's Euclideon "Unlimited Detail". The narrator (owner?) of the video needs to tone it waaaaaay down.

It was probably similar to UE5's Nanite, definitely possible 10 years ago with custom tech and very constrained assets.