Comment by markisus
There is no gradient-based optimization. It's (RGBD input, Current Camera Pose) -> Neural Net -> Gaussian Splat output.
I'm not aware of other live RGBD visualizations except for direct pointcloud rendering. Compared to pointclouds, splats are better able to render textures, view-dependent effects, and occlusions.
Except that no view-dependent effects that would benefit multi-view consistency are present in your splats.
So yes, it's very much like the RGB-D visualizations from 10 years ago, just with splats instead of points.