Comment by KerrickStaley

This 2-minute video is a great intro to the topic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVv_IQKlafQ

I think this tech has become "production-ready" recently due to a combination of research progress (the seminal paper was published in 2023 https://repo-sam.inria.fr/fungraph/3d-gaussian-splatting/) and improvements to differentiable programming libraries (e.g. PyTorch) and GPU hardware.