Ya Jakub really did an amazing job with Splatter, Martin and Will at SuperSplat also have something similar and works great. Only difference with us is that ours is light weight, native, support XR (VisionPro) and LOD structure is computed on load time, so you can load in any splat file within a couple of seconds.

Yup we compute the LOD structure on load within a couple of seconds using GPU compute shaders.

As a video game programmer, I can speak to this. For video games, we generally need geometry. Flat planes, things you can collide against, things we can reason about. Gaussian splats work as a bunch of 2D images stuck on top of each other, that in combination look correct. This is great for rendering, but makes it very very difficult/impossible to figure out whether you are inside some geometry or not, because it doesn't have any. it doesn't give you any way to reason about it as solid geometry. So in the end, you have to create the geometry that is the solid surfaces that you will collide against and move around in, and gaussian splats would be independent of that. Once you have all the geometry, its much easier to just render that.

There are tools that will generate geometry from splats, but its generally not very good, and gives messy results. Fixing the messiness is often more work than just re-doing it from scratch. This is another incredibly difficult problem that hasn't been solved particularly well.

Real world is a shitty map design

Has anyone sorted out a good way to do dynamic lighting or animation with it?

From what I have heard „Bodycam“ uses scans of actual locations for its maps.

I think they are coming, should see a few pop up in 2026 for sure.

Will be a nightmare to license the use of all this data for commercial purposes. Each house, each building, requires consent.

Sorry, but the answer is no. Unless you are willing to pay.

Apple may have good hardware, but their software support is comically bad. Their support for backwards compatibility (aside from Rosetta) has basically been "FU, I'm apple", which you need for gaming.

Apple has had little to no interest in becoming a real gaming platform. Unless that changes, gamers will more likely be moving into the sweet embrace of Gaben on Linux.

The Apple hardware is indeed very nice, but it's not a good environment for gaming. They've traditionally been quite gaming-hostile with refusing to support the later generations on OpenGL. Then there was a wrapper for Windows games called Whisky, but it was finicky and became unmaintained. Apple has their own App store which sells some games, which is in direct competition with Steam and others, so those actors are probably a bit wary of spending too much resources on the platform. Also a lot of gamer culture is related to building your own hardware, which Apple will never support.

Meanwhile gaming on Linux is becoming better than Windows these days, especially with all the trash to be circumvented on Win11, and Steam working hard on SteamOS etc.

They'll never take the gaming segment as they would need proper backward compatibility.

No game developer want to update their game continuously just to keep the lights on.

The opposite is happening at the moment, they fell lower than Linux as a gaming platform.

I was under the impression the only reason the macbook was mentioned is that it normally wouldn't be able to render this so well.

Seems like a post about the software on display. i.e. "look it can even run on an m2 macbook air"

I hate to break it to ya, but Apple Silicon isn't in the top 25 highest-performing consumer GPUs. It's probably not even in the top 25 most-efficient either: https://browser.geekbench.com/opencl-benchmarks

I'm a huge fan of Apple's hardware since they introduced their own silicon, but this is just silly. Apple doesn't have the personality needed to court and work with game companies. They're busy expecting everyone to come to them when they'd have to actually work to entice them.