Show HN: Immersive Gaussian Splat experience of Sutro Tower, San Francisco
188 comments
·February 20, 2025FinnKuhn
franky47
"Good morning, and welcome to the Black Mesa transit system" is the first thing that popped in my head when the train started moving.
skeeter_sky
The background music seamlessly blended with the chorus of Nina Nesbitt's song 'On The Run,' which was playing when I opened the site. I genuinely didn't realize there was any background music at all.
mortenjorck
As a child of the 90s, I see this as one of those rare, genuine examples of the “museum in cyberspace” imagined by the futurists of the day. Thank you for keeping the dream alive!
biofox
Glad I'm not the only one who thought of that. On opening it, my mind went immediately to the 3D virtual tours in Encarta.
gertrunde
In the same vein, it reminds me of the 1980's Domesday project, which had some sections that were similar to this, although given that it was published in 1986 , it was pretty much point and click to move between static photographs.
aa-jv
Indeed, you might be interested in the Artificial Museum project, which has managed to realize that ol' cyberpsace dream all over the place:
For example, check the Vienna map .. so many interesting locations!
DonHopkins
Decades ago a radio technician friend of mine took me up the elevator in the west leg to the top platform, to enjoy the fantastic view of the city. As the caption at the base of the west leg elevator entrance says, it was quite small and cramped indeed, and it definitely was disconcerting when it changed orientation passing through the waist of the tower!
kevthecoder
The Metaverse Standards Forum has had some activity around gaussian splats recently, for example debating whether it's too early to standardise.
There's a town hall on 5th March with speakers from Niantic and Cesium: https://metaverse-standards.org/event/gaussian-splats-town-h....
The previous splats town hall, and other related talks, are on the videos page (there was another gaussian splat talk a couple of days ago from Adobe). https://metaverse-standards.org/presentations-videos/
dmazin
San Francisco is just so beautiful. There's a serenity to it that I can't quite put my finger on. The way the fog waterfalls over the hills when you take the train in from the south... the view from Sutro. The gum tree trove near the tower.
This captured that serenity.
Samin100
Wow! I'd love to read a more in-depth blog post describing how to create one of these myself, and maybe even contribute my own splats to a collaborative library for iconic landmarks. I could see interactive splats being added to Wikipedia for popular locations.
corysama
https://reddit.com/r/GaussianSplatting/ has been slowly talking about the subject for a while now. There are probably several articles and vids in the search bar.
If you want GS news, https://radiancefields.com/ reports a lot of advances all the time.
akanet
I give a bit more color in the twitter thread https://x.com/fulligin/status/1892685973731061937
42lux
Pretty much the same workflow as photogrammetry take a lot of images/videos and put them in one of the SOTA gaussian splatting tools.
sm_park
There is an app you can try https://scaniverse.com/. it splats using your phone's gpu.
PaulHoule
Amazing.
I tried it on my MQ3 last night and it was the first thing like that which was photorealistic, but it badly overloaded the MQ3, so it was the closest experience to Sword Art Online I've had yet in VR. (The sky was transparent and my room showed through!) I should have been sitting when I started it but since the frame rate was low and the horizon improperly oriented I could have fallen transitioning to the couch if I hadn't steeled myself to rely 100% on proprioception.
Contrasted to the way too lo-fi Inside the Scaniverse and the bland but cringe Horizon Worlds it's a hit. I gotta try it again in tethered mode.
bastawhiz
This is great! Back in 2009 or so, I took dozens of high-resolution photos with my digital camera from the observation spot at Sutro Tower (towards the city, not the tower), and combined the images together in Microsoft Photosynth [0] to create an astoundingly high resolution point cloud of the city. I started with lots of zoomed-out photos, then took an overlapping grid of photos at various zoom levels. I wish Photosynth was still around; I'd love to look at the result again.
akanet
the tower released some gigapixel imagery from the top at https://explore.sutrotower.com/
toephu2
Ten television stations, three FM radio stations, and 20 wireless and mobile communications users (i.e. law enforcement agencies, taxi cabs, school buses, wireless internet, etc.) rely on Sutro Tower antennas to transmit signals over the air to the entire Bay Area.
roughly
For some reason it never occurred to me that Sutro was still a live radio tower - it’s such an SF landmark that I think I just assumed it was decommissioned or something.
michaeloder
Fantastic work. This is one of the best gaussian splats I've experienced. Especially in regards to the distant objects and sky. I was surprised at how many more details I could perceive in the VR mode. I couldn't spot the "easter egg" until I switched over.
czbond
Thank you for posting this - really cool project. Also, thank you for sharing your splat experience and methodology.
I can also recommend "Tunnel Vision: An Unauthorized BART Ride", which was made by the same author and is a really great documentary film.
It's free on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-Jrp6it9Ss