Visiting 3D virtual places sounds cool.

What communities do this? Can I do this on my laptop too to trial it?

I am sure more communities do it, but I mostly know it from VRChat. For some examples I have visited:

Scan of a park in Japan with a steam locomotive on static display: https://vrclist.com/world/1191265

Scan of a park in Japan with blooming Sakura trees: https://vrclist.com/world/1216699

In general, you can see other 3D Gaussian splatting worlds using this tag: https://vrclist.com/?type=search&sort=recent&tags=3DGS

The quality can varies a lot, so I suggest checking for number of favorites & visits to see the best scanned worlds or to go by author once you find the good ones. :)

In general, 3D gaussian splatting is not the only way you can use to reproduce a real world location in VR - you can also just do it manually, modeling the structure & possibly using textures from photos. A good example of such manual reconstruction is Gion Street from Fins: https://vrclist.com/world/859459

As for trying it out - all of the VRchat worlds can be explored in flat screen mode on a PC & VRChat can be installed from Steam or from their website. VRChat is also free, so the only thing needed is to register & it is possible to just use a Steam account as well.

Then just get one of the URLs & there is a launch URL. Alternatively you can search the worlds by name from the VRChat UI. :)