[choppaface]

NeRF does glass, fog, reflections, and some furs better than gsplat. Gsplat does normal surfaces as well or better than NeRF, and gsplat also provides explicit geometry (a point cloud). NeRF models the entire image rendering function while gsplats only model typical surfaces.

This work (and others e.g. https://creiser.github.io/binary_opacity_grid/ ) attempt to blend the raytracing aspect of NeRF with the explicit surface aspect of gsplats.

One key non-research problem is that gsplats can render on mobile devices / headsets using vanilla WebGL APIs. But approaches like this paper require CUDA (and also apparently a top-shelf desktop GPU). If Apple and others (mostly Apple has been sandbagging tho) provided better support for WebGPU or an alternative API then NeRF research would be dramatically more impactful versus gsplats. The popularity of gsplats is largely due to its accessibility.