It's true: London-based developer Iakov Sumygin has created a minimalistic playable video game using Gaussian splats for the environment data, and you can load it up and try it right now in your browser. There's not much to do, but we're a tech site, not a dedicated gaming site, and so, as you could imagine, the more interesting part of this story is the technology behind it rather than the extremely basic FPS gameplay.
To understand this post, you're going to have to understand what Gaussian splats are. If you're familiar with the concept of volume pixels, or "voxels," Gaussian splats can be thought of as "voxels of variable size and density." They're not really like voxels; they don't exist in a fixed grid, and they aren't physicalized the same way voxels are. In essence, Gaussian splats are a data type that you can use for representing a 3D world with extremely high visual fidelity, legitimately photo-realistic quality, yet with a modest rendering cost.
