The data is definitely an issue, but they do make for fairly convenient alternatives to something like matterport where you need their cameras rented etc.
Though I think matterport will just start using them since the other half of their product is the user experience on the web.
Will they though? I saw a siggraph demo of a matterport like apartment preview using gaussian splatting. It downloaded 1.6gig! for a single apartment. Checking out a current matterport demo on their site for a similar sized space it was 60meg or 26x smaller
Tbh most splats data today is not optimally stored. There’s a lot that could be done for streaming, data reduction and segmentation. So I think it’s definitely both possible and easy to reduce that data size in half if not more.
They’ll likely never be smaller than a mesh and texture though, because the data frequency will be higher. A wall can be two triangles and a texture. The same representation as splats will have to be many hundreds of points, roughly at the count of the pixels of the lowest resolvable version of that texture.
So I agree they’re far from optimal for data size. But they greatly reduce the complexity of data capture and representation.
Though I think matterport will just start using them since the other half of their product is the user experience on the web.