Unity used to be on ancient version of Mono before year 2017. Then until 2019 the option to use “up to date” version was optional. Since 2019 it has been on more or less current Mono version (Mono itself stopped getting any serious updates around 2020).

That said, if someone were to investigate ideas like this furher, then yes, making "layers" within EXR be able to get decompressed independently would be a thing to look at. Making individual "channels" perhaps not so much; it is very likely that if someone needs say "indirect specular" layer, then they need all the channels inside of it (R, G, B).

(*) I have found one or two VSE effects that do not do the correct premultiplication within their calculations. Someone(tm) should fix them at some point. But also a good question, whether there should be an option to keep previous "broken" behavior.

wrt color spaces, VSE by default does not do blending in linear color space. Default is sRGB, and variuous blending operations are done directly on sRGB values, i.e. "what four decades of photoshop has taught us to accept as expected results". VSE can be set to operate in some other color space, optionally.

wrt filtering of images, the pixel values are "just" filtered without color space awareness. So for 8bit/channel images (usually sRGB), they get "slightly incorrectly" filtered. If you want proper linear space filtering, can force images to be to floating point (any floating point images wihtin Blender are in "scene linear").

A more proper way would be to do proper color-space aware luma calculation. Which under default settings is sRGB indeed, but not necessarily so (VSE can be set to operate in some other color space). Someday!

Most of actual research I've seen (i.e. papers) are not Unity/Unreal, they rather are CUDA/Python.

The "Unity Gaussian Splatting" is not a research per se, just integration of that existing technique into Unity. As for why Unity, well yeah that's because I have experience with it, and am comfortable using it.

There's many other people experimenting with in in web ecosystem (WebGL, WebGPU, three.js, aframe etc.), that you can say is properly open source.

Blender as is right now is lacking certain functionalities to efficiently do gaussian splatting. However, for upcoming Blender 4.1 several pieces are landing - I have extended PLY file importer to be able to import custom attributes (as needed by gaussian splats), someone else contributed APIs to be able to write compute shaders from a Python addon. Once various pieces like that are in place, someone could indeed make a decently performant gaussian splat add-on or something.

zfp performance is... "underwhelming" to say the least :( (fpzip is pretty good though, if only a bit slow at decompression). Maybe zfp is much better on 3D or 4D data, and/or in lossy mode. Which might be a topic for a future post.

So "block" is not a lossless transformation/compression.

"Rendering Soft Shadows in Real Time" (https://aras-p.info/texts/files/ArasPranckevicius_Magistras_...), which was an overview of rendering techniques from that era (2005), and also two new approaches that were both kinda silly in retrospect :)

That said, not that many games use the GPU-accelerated parts of it; for a lot of gameplay physics CPU code path of PhysX works just fine and does not have special hardware requirements.