Comment by markisus
Gaussian Splatting allows you to create a photorealistic representation of an environment from just a collection of images. Philosophically, this is a form of geometric scene understanding from raw pixels, which has been a holy grail of computer vision since the beginning.
Usually creating a Gaussian splat representation takes a long time and uses an iterative gradient-based optimization procedure. Using RGBD helps me sidestep this optimization, as much of the geometry is already present in the depth channel and so it enables the real-time aspect of my technique.
When you say "big deal", I imagine you are also asking about business or societal implications. I can't really speak on those, but I'm open to licensing this IP to any companies which know about big business applications :)
Thanks! That makes a lot of sense, I might dig into this after work some more.
By "big deal," I meant more for people specializing around computer graphics, computer vision, or even narrower subfields of either of those two -- a big deal from an academic interest perspective.
Sure, this might also have implications in society and business, but I'm a nerd, and I appreciate a good nerding out over something cool, niche, and technically impressive.