Show HN: Immersive Gaussian Splat experience of Sutro Tower, San Francisco

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

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!

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!

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.

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.

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/

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.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynth

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.

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.

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.

Thank you for posting this - really cool project. Also, thank you for sharing your splat experience and methodology.

This brings a meta quest 3s to its knees. It's almost so bad you can't quit it, and the video lags 15 seconds, which is very disorienting to be immersed in (it can make you fall down). Shame, since it looks gorgeous.