SMERF

SMERF: Streamable Memory Efficient Radiance Fields for Real-Time Large-Scene Exploration

While NERFs (neural radiance fields) were seen as the big thing in volumetric capture and rendering, they drifted into the background when the more performant Gaussian Splatting tech appeared. However, Google has been doing research to make NERFs suitable for real-time applications too.

This is where SMERF comes along. I won't get into the ins and outs of the advancements, but their project site has all the details as well as some great demos you can try in your own web browser. It looks like Google is rolling out this tech to Google Maps to recreate 3D interiors for shops, cafes, etc. I'm interested to see which approach ends up being most applicable to VFX.