Gaussian splats are a backdrop, not a model
Splats give photographic fidelity at real-time frame rates and are the best answer available for captured environments. They are also unmeasurable, uneditable and uncollidable — so we composite meshes into them rather than replacing meshes with them.
The first time you see a good Gaussian splat reconstruction it is genuinely startling. Foliage, fabric, chrome reflections, thin structures — everything that a photogrammetry mesh pipeline destroys survives intact, at 60 fps.
Then you try to take a dimension from it and discover there is nothing to measure. There is no surface, only a cloud of oriented ellipsoids that happens to look correct from viewpoints near the capture path. Move too far off it and the illusion frays.
So the useful architecture is hybrid. The captured environment is splats — the showroom, the site, the room. The things people configure, measure or collide with are meshes, composited in. Depth sorting between the two is fiddly and worth the trouble.
The format situation is also unsettled. PLY works, .splat is a de facto convention, .spz compresses well, and none of it is standardised. Treat splat assets as regenerable derivatives, keep the source captures, and expect to reprocess in eighteen months.
Written by the capture team at 3D.MBA, Ahmedabad.
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