Would be interesting if researchers would start using Blender/Godot instead of Unity/Unreal since they are not truly open source. But I guess you might need a particular skillset for this to work with, which might come from the pro game development community which might be more familiar with these studio tools.
Most of actual research I've seen (i.e. papers) are not Unity/Unreal, they rather are CUDA/Python.
The "Unity Gaussian Splatting" is not a research per se, just integration of that existing technique into Unity. As for why Unity, well yeah that's because I have experience with it, and am comfortable using it.
There's many other people experimenting with in in web ecosystem (WebGL, WebGPU, three.js, aframe etc.), that you can say is properly open source.
Blender as is right now is lacking certain functionalities to efficiently do gaussian splatting. However, for upcoming Blender 4.1 several pieces are landing - I have extended PLY file importer to be able to import custom attributes (as needed by gaussian splats), someone else contributed APIs to be able to write compute shaders from a Python addon. Once various pieces like that are in place, someone could indeed make a decently performant gaussian splat add-on or something.
Thanks for your response and incredible work, and also to learn people are using different toolsets. Its great to hear Blender 4.1 is also shaping up to be a landmark release. Compute shaders are a new interest of mine so hopefully I can do some playing around with it.
Do you think we will see Gaussian splatting integrated into a game in the (near or not near) future?
The author "Aras P" worked for Unity close to 2 decades (retired beginning of this year). Doesn't invalidate what you said, just some background on why Unity :)
