Esri has shipped production Gaussian splatting across ArcGIS — at city, state, and national scale. At Esri's User Conference in San Diego, I sat down with Arkadiusz Szadkowski, who leads reality mapping business development globally at Esri, to talk about how a technique that was GitHub demos three years ago became a delivered layer in national mapping programs. We get into why Gaussian splatting solves two problems meshes have never handled well, thin structures and reflective surfaces, and why that opens up the infrastructure market specifically power lines, substations, telecom towers, linear assets, open-pit mining. We also cover analysis beyond rendering (line of sight, viewshed, measurement, snapping, segmentation), why file format standardization through Khronos and glTF matters for procurement, and what geospatial AI applied on top of splat texture information looks like, including a tree inventory that mapped 7,000 trees, with canopy size and height, in six minutes. CHAPTER...