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!
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/
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Thank you for posting this - really cool project. Also, thank you for sharing your splat experience and methodology.
I had the privilege of spending about 30 minutes at level 6 in May of 2023. It was as spectacular as you might imagine. I would say that if you have even the slightest fear of heights the whole experience would be a nightmare.
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.
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.
This is very cool. I feel like the technique used (gaussian splatting) gives it a more realistic appearance from certain viewpoints. It almost felt like my monitor turned into a window in the sky looking out over the city for a moment. The illusion falls apart once once drifts too far from the nominal viewing area, but until then, it looks even better than something like Google Earth which renders actual polygons for everything.
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.
This is awesome. Have been enamored with Sutro Tower since I moved here a few years back. Love that you can see what the different antennas are for as well.
Not only does it look amazing, it renders super fast even on an iGPU. Feels like magic. A couple of questions: Why do objects flicker when moving the camera? And why do surfaces get translucent when close up?
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.
If you haven't seen Tunnel Vision (same author) please do yourself a favor and watch it. Dude does some fantastic projects.
How feasible would it be to generate high-quality guassian splats of everywhere, starting with big cities, like Google Maps street view and 3D view?
Then you can make video games and interactive experiences in real-world locations. I doubt the collision handling is there, but you can at least start with something like Microsoft Flight Simulator with low-flying drones.
It would also be great for training AI to generate realistic-looking scenarios. Besides playing and working (ex: VR) in real places, you can in very-realistic liminal spaces. (And it's training on public areas, so less ethical issues.)
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.
This is really cool, nice work!
Something I’ve been looking for for a while is an interactive view of SF from above - I think it’d be cool to experience the verticality of SF and see how all the different hills relate to each other (and gmaps/earth just isn't cutting it).
this is actually pretty good for around the panhandle, but if anyone is aware of something like that for the whole city please let me know!
What is the limiting factor for level of detail here? Is it the source data (too low res camera/too far away), the processing, or getting it rendered in real-time in browser? Is this the full detail, or is this somehow downsampled/compressed version for the web?
Can anyone give some numbers for a more intuitive understanding of the advantages from GS? How large would the file/content be if it is in mesh? Can we get similar rendering FPS?
This is great but please implement mouse look! It makes it way more immersive and is the lingua franca of FPS interactions.
I can't find the easter egg. Clues appreciated. :)
it so nearly runs on a Quest 3. The next gen of mobile XR chipsets (or maybe even the current gen with less thermal throttling) are going to be able to handle these kinds of scenes with a bit more optimization.
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).
Exponential back-off while zooming in is nice, but maybe reset if scrolling back out.
Very beautiful and nostalgic, so well done.
I used to live nearby and my favorite “urban” hike was going up Glen Canyon, up and down the two Twin Peaks, loop through Sutro Forest and then go back to downtown walking down 17th. Loved those weekend walks.
I'm biased bc I worked with the team while there, but I believe Snap's acquisition of PlayCanvas was one of their most underrated. Incredible technology.
I wasn't expecting to be able to see through the lattice structure. Amazing amount of detail.
Naively, it seems to me that the many needle-like artifacts further away from the tower could be filtered out?
The help text mentions a "little cube" that would enable AR mode, but I can see no cube.
Touch controls are very weird and don't rotate the view as expected.
That looks rad.
One bit of feedback: don't move the camera if someone clicks one of the circles, that is super disorienting. There is also a bug that if a drag to move the camera happens to end on a circle, the popup opens.
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.
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.
Sadly the controls are not mobile friendly and I ended up spinning wildly.
30 MB! Very cool! It runs about 0.5 FPS on my iGPU but alas... good work anyway
That is so cool! I really wanna do a project like this just for fun to understand it
It doesn't seem to load on Android Chrome or Firefox. Maybe a hug of death?
That's super cool, I like how they explain what each antenna is used for.
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That's wonderful, nice work! Love the ambient audio track.
This is amazing. Hoping you will share more of these soon.
Looking under the surface has its own charm
Beautiful. Slow on my phone, but it is doing alot!
Fun fact: NBC does not broadcast from Sutro tower, but San Bruno…
Which means effectively zero over-the-air reception in parts of the Mission. Lesson learned during a Super Bowl party the 2010s.
Can we see the images it was made with
My favorite structure in SF. I hope I get the chance to visit the top deck someday.
very cool, reminds me of watchdogs. where's the music from? it's very calming
So gorgeous.
This is beautiful. I didn't know about gaussian splatting, seems like really cool tech
wow, this is wonderfully made
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.
The fidelity is amazing !
very cool! always wondered what that tower was haha, now i know!
very nice, vincent!
love it. love this city, too <3
Excellent!
I know this from the Watchdog game
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?
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".
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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