[MITSardine]

Games are the least of it, the vast majority of scientific applications to do with physics use meshes rather than point clouds.

This is because a point cloud does not represent a surface or a volume until the points are connected to form, well, a surface or a volume.

And physical problems are most often defined over surfaces or volumes. For instance, waves don't propagate over sparse sets of points, but within continuous domains.

However, for applications where geometric accuracy is needed, I think you wouldn't want to use a method based on a minimal number of photographs anyways. For instance, the Lascaux cavern was mapped in 3D a decade ago based on "good old" algorithms (not machine learning) and instruments (more sophisticated than a phone camera). So these critiques are missing the point, in my opinion. These Gaussian Splatting methods are very impressive for the constraints they operate under!