In fact you wouldn't even need to be limited to earth. Why not throw in Google Moon and steal a moon buggy while shooting scientific rovers and doing cool flips out of craters?

I wouldn't knock the research. The results look impressive to me.

True. If you bring the viewpoint down to near street level and look horizontally, it's worse than traditional photogrammetry methods.

I've been looking for algorithms like this for representing distant regions in virtual worlds. Open Drone Map can do a good job, sometimes, but it really needs a cleanup pass.

This is gaussian splatting. I'm pretty confident that google/apple have not done that.

This is where we were heading with our 3D volumetric video company https://ayvri.com

We were working on blending 3D satellite imagery with your ground view (or low flying in the case of paragliders) photos and videos to create a 3D scene.

Our technology was acquired prior to us being able to fully realize the vision (and we moved on to another project).

I knew their name because, when I worked for an Airbus subsidiary, we talked with them about a solution to generate 3D environments for any/every airport.

They had some cool stuff but also some wonky stuff at the time (like highway overpasses actually being rendered as walls across the highway).