Sounds great to me. A true sphere inversion does yield extreme distortion near the center of inversion—which is essential to its mathematical purpose, but may indeed be undesirable aesthetically. The radial adjustments will, as you say, make the environment easier to “read” than a pure inversion. This tension between angle distortion and volume distortion is exactly the tension encountered by mapmakers throughout history. So, you are in good company. Anyway, what you have made looks quite beautiful for the intended purpose.

Since nobody called it out in the comments, this “new way” to show 3D Gaussian splats is a basic 19th century construction, studied by Jakob Steiner and others, called a “sphere inversion” or “Möbius transformation”: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invers… It looks good because it is an example of a so-called conformal map, which preserves angles, but distorts scales. However, when you look at something up close, it doesn't really matter what its absolute scale is (whereas angular distortion is far more noticeable). Conformal maps, namely the 16th century Mercator projection (old as it is) remains the projection of choice in Google Maps and other mapping tools, since it is the unique map that (i) preserves angles, and (ii) keeps north pointing "up" everywhere on the globe. The 3DGS scheme shown here is just bumping up the usual approach up one dimension: apply a conformal projection; keep the "up" direction fixed. The specific choice of conformal maps (inversions in the sphere) are in fact the only choice available in 3D, due to Liouville's theorem on conformal mappings. [Orange illustration below is from my PhD thesis on conformal geometry: cs.cmu.edu/~kmcrane/Projects…]