The main idea behind ROSplat is to make it easier to send and visualize Gaussians over the network, especially in robotics applications. For instance, imagine you're running a SLAM algorithm on a mobile robot and generating Gaussians as part of the mapping or localization process. With ROSplat, you can stream those Gaussians via ROS messages and visualize them live on another machine. It’s mostly a visualization tool that usess ROS for communication, making it accessible and convenient for robotics engineers and researchers already working within that ecosystem.
Just to clarify, ROSplat isn’t aiming to be faster than state-of-the-art rendering methods. The actual rendering is done with OpenGL, not ROS, so there’s no performance claim there. ROS is just used for the messaging, which does introduce a bit of overhead, but the benefit is in the ease of integration and live data sharing in robotics setups.
Also, I wrote a simple technical report explaining some things in more detail, you can find it in the repo!
Hope that clears things up a bit!