Abstract: Our innate ability to reconstruct the 3D world around us from our eyes alone is a fundamental part of human perception. For computers, however, this task remained a significant challenge — until the advent of Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs). Upon their introduction, NeRFs marked a paradigm shift in the field of novel view synthesis, demonstrating huge improvements in visual realism and geometric accuracy over prior works. The subsequent proliferation of NeRF variants has only expanded their capabilities, unlocking larger scenes, achieving even higher visual fidelity, and accelerating both training and inference. Nevertheless, NeRF is no longer the tool of choice for 3D reconstruction. Why? Join a researcher from the front lines as we explore NeRF’s foundations, dissect its strengths and weaknesses, see how the field has evolved, and explore the future of novel view synthesis.