There’s some movement in this area to be able to surface quantize the splats but you are right, right now it’s simply just visual language and isn’t useful in the pipeline.
replyExtracting a surface mesh is possible, but the result is going to be really ugly (like the high-poly meshes from generative AI that are useless to artists)!
replyMesh processing is a very difficult research domain in computer graphics that has been iterated for several decades, and we still don't have a good automated solution for retopology (Partly because the problem is hard to define in a mathematical way, but also since it's not a problem you can just solve with AI by throwing data and compute at it)
I used voxelization of the splats in the past so I appreciate the notes on the difficulty but this is sort of what PlayCanvas is doing here. Taking the splats, making voxels, meshing.
replyIt's a novel approach and worked well in BIM a few years ago, though not anything real-time.