The landscape of 3D scanning and reconstruction is experiencing its most dramatic transformation since the introduction of consumer LiDAR systems. As we progress through 2025, two revolutionary technologies—Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) and 3D Gaussian Splatting—are fundamentally changing how we capture, process, and render three-dimensional environments. These AI-powered techniques are not merely incremental improvements; they represent a paradigm shift that’s democratizing photo-realistic 3D content creation.