I don’t know. Maybe today, but tomorrow?

If you can sample points inside a volume, in theory you could do that with splat geometry. If someone figures out a way to pass in animation time to a sampler, sample along geometry/wireframe or something else, and keep it from overly twinkling it might change everything.

I’m hand waving all the complexity into “if done one figures out”, of course.

I just don’t see why this method can’t evolve in the way diffusion models have evolved (knowing very little of the geberative mechanics of splats).

Since splats sample the light field after surface reflection, you can't do realtime shading with splats the way you can with raytracing and rasterization. I guess it could be animated like a holographic movie, but not like a video game and not like a 3D editor, because the light for all angles in all frames has to be precomputed.

> If someone figures out a way to pass in animation time to a sampler, sample along geometry/wireframe or something else, and keep it from overly twinkling it might change everything.

Not sure that's what you mean, but there was recently a paper where they put meshless (e.g. voxel or SDF) geometry in an animated tetrahedral mesh "cage" and then animate the meshless model by animating the mesh cage:

https://diglib.eg.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/bd94e19b-98...

https://youtube.com/watch?v=6lKAvxV2mno

https://youtube.com/watch?v=3c3-ue-fd88

Though this currently isn't compatible with 3DGS if I understand the limitations section correctly.

> Finally, our method operates unordered, limiting its suitability for complex volumetric effects. However, a potential solution lies in sorting the generated intervals for proper blending. This enhancement could improve our approach’s compatibility with various meshless representations, such as radiance fields and volumetric lighting.