You have to ask about what it's a dead end for. It seems pretty cool for the moral equivalent of fully 3D photographs. That's a completely legitimate use case.
For 3D gaming engines? I struggle to see how the fundamental primitive can be made to sing and dance in the way that they demand. People will try, though. But from this perspective, gaussians strike me more as a final render format than a useful intermediate representation. If they are going to use gaussians there's going to have to be something else invented to make them practical to use for engines in the meantime, and there's still an awful lot of questions there.
For other uses? Who knows.
But the world is not all 3D gaming and visual special effects.
Many of the core papers for this came from Meta's VR team (codec avatars), Apple ML (Spatial Compute) and Nvidia - companies deeply invested in VR/Spatial compute. It's clear that they see it as a key technology to further their interests in the space, and they are getting plenty of free help:
After being open sourced in May last year, there were 79 papers overall published on the topic.
It's more than 150 this year, more than one a day, advancing this "dead end" forward.
Goals aren't results. Maybe gaussian splatting will be the wave of the future and in 10 years it'll be the only graphics tech around.
In the meantime, if it isn't, it will hardly be the first promising new graphics technology to turn out to be completely unsuited for all the things people hoped for.
Most of what you linked to appears to correspond to what I intuitively described as them being an output format rather than useful directly; the last paper appear to go in the other direction to extract information from them but again doesn't function on the splats directly. The actual work isn't being done in the gaussians themselves, and the interesting results are precisely in what is not being done through the splats... but pointing that out explicitly that's not how you get funding nowadays. Two otherwise-identical proposals, but one that sings the praises of the buzzwords while the other is phrased to be critical of it, will have very different outcomes.
For 3D gaming engines? I struggle to see how the fundamental primitive can be made to sing and dance in the way that they demand. People will try, though. But from this perspective, gaussians strike me more as a final render format than a useful intermediate representation. If they are going to use gaussians there's going to have to be something else invented to make them practical to use for engines in the meantime, and there's still an awful lot of questions there.
For other uses? Who knows.
But the world is not all 3D gaming and visual special effects.