"explorable" and "immersive" is definitely a bold choice of words when you can't really get below the level of the buildings before the gaussian splatting is very obvious. Sure, it's impressive that you can get that detailed from a few satellite images, but I think that might be overselling it a bit

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Animats 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

> you can't really get below the level of the buildings before the gaussian splatting is very obvious.

True. If you bring the viewpoint down to near street level and look horizontally, it's worse than traditional photogrammetry methods.

I've been looking for algorithms like this for representing distant regions in virtual worlds. Open Drone Map can do a good job, sometimes, but it really needs a cleanup pass.

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echelon 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

We're early days. Models will soon interpolate all of that. Eventually in real time.

I wouldn't knock the research. The results look impressive to me.

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Skyy93 3 days ago | parent [-]

We probably won't. GS is a reconstructive method, so when data is unavailable, you can only perform poor interpolation. You would need additional generative, not reconstructive, models. However, this would open the door to unfaithful augmentation again.

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echelon 3 days ago | parent [-]

Different applications.

GIS won't want generative hallucinations.

Consumer mapping apps, social applications, and games (eg. flight sims) will want the maps to look as good as possible.

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wkat4242 3 days ago | parent [-]

GIS don't want half exploded buildings either. Nor would they care about photographic textures on the 3D models.

	▲	fsloth 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		You’d be surprised what GIS - or at least GIS - adjacent customers want. If you think about any cute-but-useless map detail that comes to your mind there is likely a paying customer for it.

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makeitdouble 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

That's a matter of data, and this looks promising to me. If instead of satellite images they'd feed it drone shots they could probably get down to a level of detail that becomes actually immersive and would be way beyond the digital twins we currently have.