Beautiful.

What I love about gaussian splats is the way they degrade - instead of a hard cutoff or LoD changing spheres into cubes etc., they get increasingly "dreamy" - the basic idea is still there, just less detailed.

Take for example this scene:

https://superspl.at/scene/e721ea7c

If you navigate closer to the trees, things around you become blurry - as if the very fabric of reality unraveled.

Yeah, it's an incredibly cool effect. Reality breaking down into fog and frosted glass and paint smudges and slivers of northern lights and all the dandelion fluff. Even navigation becomes harder and less predictable as coherence recedes.

This feels so much closer to how minds must store and process spatial information than the usual 3D models do.

I don't know anything about them but it's a cool effect. At least on this strawberry, you're not zooming in but rather traveling closer. I don't see the increasing (made up) detail you'd expect from a zoom, we sort of pop through the skin into an invented interior.

They remind me a lot of the 'memories' scene in Minority Report:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arTIRgdEb1g

I like that they are sort of between a photo and a 3D model. Nothing quite like it.

its funny that sky features like clouds and blue patches end up being fit very close to ground level because there isn't a difference in perspective to cue in the algorithm that the skybox should be tall, I wonder if there is any way to incorporate the fitting algorithm with simultaneous lidar data about true distances of things to allow scenes to be viewed from further up

That's what Google Street View should be like more.

Is there a specific name for this “dreaminess” effect?