[graffix]

Right. Note that Gaussian splatting as a rendering primitive dates from the early 90s, but it never saw much use. Splats aren't very good for magnification (important for medical/scientific/engineering visualization), nor do they have easy support for domain repetition (important for video games).

The new thing is fast regression of a real light field into Gaussian splats, which can then be rendered at reasonable rates. Dynamic lighting requires full inverse rendering as a preprocess, which is way beyond the scope of the technique. Technically Gaussian splats could form part of an inverse rendering pipeline, and also be the final target representation, but I'm not sure there would be any benefit over alternative rendering primitives.