Apple Beat Google To It! 3D Gaussian Splats Are Coming to Maps

Holy crap! Apple just beat Google to the punch -- 3D Gaussian splatting is coming to Apple Maps. These 3D scenes are made from oblique aerial imagery. But unlike blobby photogrammetry -- no more broccoli trees, no more melted powerlines -- ground level detail that actually holds up. Here's hoping Google Maps/Earth follows suit soon -- they have a significantly larger corpus of sensor data to work with. Time to splat the world!