About
Welcome to my 3D model of San Francisco’s Sutro Tower. Feel free to explore it at your own pace. If you’re on a phone, you can also engage the AR mode by clicking the little cube, it’ll let you explore the scene by walking around and waving your phone.
Sutro Tower is a wonderful building, and I hope you enjoy learning a bit about it here. If you want to learn more, check out the much more thorough official digital tour.
This scan is made possible by recent advances in Gaussian Splatting. In particular, this scene was shot on drones, aligned in RealityCapture, trained in gsplat, compressed by SOGS, and rendered by PlayCanvas.
If I’ve made any mistakes, or if you want to get in touch, feel free to reach out o
22 Comments
slater
Uncaught SyntaxError: import assertions are not currently supported
ovenchips
I can't find the easter egg. Clues appreciated. :)
daft_pink
This is amazing. Hoping you will share more of these soon.
falcor84
It's really cool, but I can't shake off an "uncanny valley" feeling, with all of the small quirks in the geometry. What I think I'd be interested in is a post-processing step where this splat is automatically converted to a 3d model that approximates each component, only falling back to the point cloud if there's no simple shape that fits the observation at a particular location.
thot_experiment
If you haven't seen Tunnel Vision (same author) please do yourself a favor and watch it. Dude does some fantastic projects.
whatever1
The fidelity is amazing !
pinoy420
Can we see the images it was made with
CamperBob2
What blows me away is that R/C drones can operate that close to those antennas. Frequency differences don't tend to matter much once you go past 100,000 watts.
xrd
So gorgeous.
FlamingMoe
Beautiful, the visuals combined with the music gave me quite a nostalgic feeling for the city where I once worked daily but haven't visited in years.
yapyap
I know this from the Watchdog game
JKCalhoun
The wife got me a Sutro Tower shirt one year for Christmas. This was when OTA digital television rolled out. When the rest of San Jose seemed to be taking down their TV aerials or letting them fall apart I was nerding out: purchasing a new one and mast sections from Rat Shack to set up one on our house.
Scanning the spectrum to pull in KQED, etc. The first Austin City Limits I saw in HD blew my mind.
I think all but one TV station came to the South Bay by way of Sutro. Quite a reach.
atarian
very cool, reminds me of watchdogs. where's the music from? it's very calming
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.
LeoPanthera
Broadcast television is amazing, and I'm so sad it's dying out. OK, maybe we don't need to tune in at 6 to watch the latest episode of "Friends" anymore, but for any kind of live events – news, sport, politics, having high-definition video you can pull right out of the air without having to worry about paying for data, latency, or bandwidth limitations, is amazing.
For certain applications the internet can never compete with "broadcast".
spps11
very cool! always wondered what that tower was haha, now i know!
IshKebab
This does not work at all on Android Chrome. The about dialog flies in super slowly, continually re-layouting the text, and there's no "small cube" and no way to dismiss the about dialog either.
The background looks tantalising but maybe a little more testing is needed… (e.g. for the most common browser/OS in the world).
rd
Does anything like this exist for just flying around cities (not SF, anywhere) in general? Would love to experience what a drone sees even if it's in a limited area.
wst_
I think it would help to be able to move up and down (ex. space and shift keys) without changing the camera angle. This seems a better solution, to me, than existing pan with 3rd mouse button.
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.
legitster
Completely unrelated, but aerial views of San Francisco blow my mind with how under-zoned the city is.
One of the most desirable places on earth to live and it's on a small peninsula. Yet it's a sea of single-family homes as far as the eye can see.
The distance between Sutro Tower and the "Downtown" SF is less than the distance between the Brooklyn Bridge and Central Park. But could you imagine if that space was filled with 2-3 story townhomes?
fuddle
That's super cool, I like how they explain what each antenna is used for.