The scene is only going to be loaded / unloaded all at once, you can just load the data into contiguous arrays and index from them. No need to use shared_ptr since lifetimes aren't that complex.

Ah... sweet summer child.

> Intellectual property theft. How can we be sure that no output of our American frontier AI models was used while training these Chinese models?

The US AI models are already using pirated copyrighted material off the Internet. If Chinese models also do this, they're at least giving it back to the people by releasing their weights as open source.

Template metaprogramming is sometimes very useful to get around C++'s language restrictions, but I tend to use it sparingly.

Or if you're even lazier, you can easily make a more automatic RTTI system with some templates / macros that works much faster than dynamic_cast! (See https://github.com/royvandam/rtti)

The world we live in is already dead, and we are wandering with its ghosts. After capitalism strips everything off its materiality and leaves only with its symbols, only the nostalgia for a non-existent past remains.

Vanilla 3DGS cannot do any specular lighting or reflections - the color is basically baked in the splats. There's some active research going on to create richer Gaussian splats so we can do shading (or even ray tracing on it) - but haven't seen anyone using in production yet.

The contributions of 3DGS lie in how fast you can make them in modern GPU hardware (tiling + sorting with threads), and how to make the pipeline differentiable so that you can fit the Gaussian splats with photogrammetry data. Similar to the history of deep learning, it became technically feasible once the GPU hardware was powerful enough.

I think future papers would probably continue improving on this method and focus on how to sample the points more efficiently while being unbiased (similar to how ray-tracing solved their performance issues). Or maybe... we can just add a deep-learning based denoiser and call it a day!

Some gamedevs hoped Nanite would eliminate the need for rasterization hardware, but because it's only performant in certain scenarios (very high poly meshes) consumers are pushing back against this.

Or well... since we now have Claude I might have a jab at this someday in my free time.