I've just learnt what Gaussian Splatting is, and I fear it may become my entire personality. At the risk of oversimplification, Gaussian Splatting is a rendering technique that gives you 'photo-real' graphics at a fraction of the resource cost required by a number of other mainstream game development options. That fact alone is enough to encourage me to don the mantle of 'Gaussian girlie'—at least for this weekend column—and take a deep dive into the subject with an expert.

So, first things first, it's pronounced 'GOW-see-an,' and not 'GAWE-shun' as I have been saying for the last week. This is because it's derived from the name of the German mathematician that discovered them, Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss . Don't worry, I'm going to keep the maths to a minimum here—the passing GCSE grade I got over a decade ago has seen to that.…