Apples, not oranges. This isn't for 3d models and scenes- think of it as a fancy version of streetview or an apartment walkthrough. Those project pictures onto a sphere around you. Gaussian splats are an improvement that uses multiple images to interpolate viewpoints- take two pictures from different angles, and guassian splats let you take a look from between those views, or above or below them.

This method uses ai to generate even more unseen structure, so with relatively few images you can still represent a real scene with some level of fidelity. It will never need dynamic lights or animation because the point is just to look as close as possible to a still image. Splats do that FAR better and more efficiently than you ever could with dynamic lighting, triangulated models, and visual effects.

I see your point, but also consider that interactivity comes to mind in part because 3d models are so expensive to describe compared to 2d shapes that they're largely worth it for interactive stuff. We might see more innovation on that front with a low-cost barrier to entry.

Plus, scaling dynamic lighting up has always been the Big Bad of computer graphics, and precomputation will always give us an amazing heuristic to use against it. Everything else basically tends towards not mattering: we can only absorb a finite number of details, but we live in a world with virtually infinite lights.

Honestly, I thought this was the most practical and usable example of AI generation I've seen to date. I actually found it refreshing after all the guff we usually see.

I bet in a couple of years it'll be standard for estate agents to show 3D views like this on their web sites, architects converting quick paintovers of existing sites to 3D models, improvements to Street View, and so on. Anywhere where you want a quick 3D view of a space based on a few photos taken on a smartphone and where accuracy isn't 100% important.

For things like games, it still follows the existing photogrammetry workflow (with all of those problems), but it might reduce the number of photos needed to create a point cloud.