[HN Gopher] Show HN: Immersive Gaussian Splat experience of Sutr...
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Show HN: Immersive Gaussian Splat experience of Sutro Tower, San
Francisco
Author : akanet
Score : 792 points
Date : 2025-02-20 21:39 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (vincentwoo.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (vincentwoo.com)
| slater wrote:
| Uncaught SyntaxError: import assertions are not currently
| supported
| akanet wrote:
| Oh interesting, can you tell me what browser environment you're
| on?
| duskwuff wrote:
| I'm getting the same error on Firefox.
| akanet wrote:
| Thank you, a fix is deploying now.
| duskwuff wrote:
| Thanks! Works great now.
| ovenchips wrote:
| I can't find the easter egg. Clues appreciated. :)
| akanet wrote:
| Look around closely at the top level of the tower :)
| qingcharles wrote:
| I wonder if it's the dude waving from inside the gantry at the
| top?
| daft_pink wrote:
| This is amazing. Hoping you will share more of these soon.
| falcor84 wrote:
| 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.
| c-fe wrote:
| This is close to the idea of convex splatting (recent paper) in
| which convex shapes are used to approximate these real 3d
| objects as they are better suited than gaussians
| lbeckman314 wrote:
| https://convexsplatting.github.io/
|
| TIL -- very cool work!
| thot_experiment wrote:
| If you haven't seen Tunnel Vision (same author) please do
| yourself a favor and watch it. Dude does some fantastic projects.
| pinoy420 wrote:
| Great video if you like watching videos from the front of BART
| which is pretty boring tbf. Much better videos of locos
| travelling through the alps
| akanet wrote:
| Dude
| derwiki wrote:
| Sweet!
| pinoy420 wrote:
| Dude, but what's mine say?
| thot_experiment wrote:
| Context defines content.
| whatever1 wrote:
| The fidelity is amazing !
| pinoy420 wrote:
| Can we see the images it was made with
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| So gorgeous.
| FlamingMoe wrote:
| 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.
| null0pointer wrote:
| I had the same feeling. Excellent work!
| yapyap wrote:
| I know this from the Watchdog game
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| very cool, reminds me of watchdogs. where's the music from? it's
| very calming
| akanet wrote:
| It's actually a mix my girlfriend made, but the main track is
| https://soundcloud.com/martinlandh/moonlit-serenity
| diogocp wrote:
| What about the track in your video "I finally made it to the
| top of Sutro Tower"? It's beautiful!
|
| The video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7-3CKulsCc
| Samin100 wrote:
| 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.
| akanet wrote:
| I give a bit more color in the twitter thread
| https://x.com/fulligin/status/1892685973731061937
| wonger_ wrote:
| https://xcancel.com/fulligin/status/1892685973731061937
| pbronez wrote:
| Only seems to have the first post; rest of thread didn't
| load
| marcellus23 wrote:
| Works for me.
| corysama wrote:
| 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.
| 42lux wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| There is an app you can try https://scaniverse.com/. it splats
| using your phone's gpu.
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| 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".
| perching_aix wrote:
| ? Is over-the-air TV broadcast not encrypted and compressed to
| oblivion in the US? Cause it definitely is here, and you're
| expected to pay for a decoder card, except for a small handful
| of channels.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| It's not encrypted but compression and reliability of the
| signal is a mixed bag. It's not encrypted because congress
| mandated it as a condition for privatizing the analog
| bandwidth (ie there's a carve out for public digital and
| broadcasters have to broadcast publicly accessible signal
| just like they had to on analog)
| perching_aix wrote:
| Oh wow okay, definitely didn't expect this. That's quite
| the power move. I guess it's also why it's disappearing, at
| least partly.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| Not really a power move but public broadcast will
| probably disappear at some point in a boiling the frog
| kind of way, but it's definitely being starved and killed
| by corporate interests.
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| It's not encrypted, no. And the picture quality is very good.
| Not 4K, but good quality 720 or 1080, depending on the
| channel.
| perching_aix wrote:
| That's pretty cool. Do you know what kind of codec and
| bitrate is involved / should I just do my own research?
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| H.264 video with AC3 audio.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATSC_standards
| gorbypark wrote:
| Most every OTA channel here in Spain (at least in Valencia)
| is 1080i, with a few being 720i, but there's two 4K test
| channels, one SDR and one HDR. Not sure of the bitrate, but
| the SDR one looks stunning on my TV (which "supports" HDR
| but looks horrible in HDR mode). They usually just play
| loops of B roll of various Spanish things, festivals,
| random clips of theatre productions and things like that.
| It's pretty neat!
| ghostly_s wrote:
| Are OTA channels subscription based where you are (where)? Or
| the "decoder card" is just some middleware crap you buy once?
| Our OTA TV has always been ad-supported, they just moved the
| same channels to digital though in larger markets there are
| now quite a few new low-overhead licensed syndicated content
| options, presumably due to the cheaper cost of air slots.
| perching_aix wrote:
| It's a subscription, billed monthly, with a minimum one
| year contract period. To the best I can tell, the service
| provider is in a completely monopolistic position too (is
| the only digital OTA (analog has been banned, and OTA is
| more commonly referred to here as terrestrial) television
| broadcaster in the country and is privately owned), so
| yeah, good fun all around.
|
| I looked into it a bit deeper inspired by this thread, and
| it seems to be an explicit feature of the European digital
| TV broadcast system standard (DVB-T) [0], commonly used not
| just here in Europe, but also elsewhere around the world
| apparently [1].
|
| The formal name for the "decoder card" I recalled is
| apparently CAM [2], which communicates with the TV using
| the DVB-CI protocol(?) [3], and uses the form factor of the
| old PCMCIA cards. I also see that the algorithm used is the
| CSA [4], and even more curiously I see mentions of DES [5]
| in the article for the encryption (with further mentions
| that AES is a new addition to the standard that is
| presently underadopted).
|
| The only vendor-specific bit to this, because there is a
| bit that is vendor-specific, seems to be the key exchange
| algorithm used, although the articles are unclear to me
| about this. Interesting subject for sure. Here where I
| live, the Conax system [6] is in use supposedly. To be
| clear, they're not the service provider and have nothing to
| do with them (to the best I can tell).
|
| Addendum:
|
| Apparently I misinterpreted how it works a bit. So the
| Conditional-Access Module is plugged into the TV, so far so
| good, but that on its own is not going to achieve anything.
| The actual unlock comes from a smart card bundled with the
| CAM, and you're to put that into the CAM. As you can tell,
| we've only ever watched the free channels :)
|
| [0] Digital Video Broadcasting - Terrestrial,
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVB-T
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Digital_terrestrial_
| telev...
|
| [2] Conditional-Access Module,
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conditional-access_module
|
| [3] Digital Video Broadcasting - Common Interface,
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Interface
|
| [4] Common Scrambling Algorithm,
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Scrambling_Algorithm
|
| [5] Data Encryption Standard,
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Encryption_Standard
|
| [6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conax
| spps11 wrote:
| very cool! always wondered what that tower was haha, now i know!
| IshKebab wrote:
| 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).
| akanet wrote:
| Wow surprising, do you have any console errors? I tested
| extensively in Android chrome. To dismiss the modal you can tap
| in the margin.
| IshKebab wrote:
| I'm not sure how to see console errors on mobile (without the
| remote dev tools anyway).
|
| I tried again today and it's still really slow but I do get
| the controls this time so I was able to use it. Very neat!
|
| This is on a Pixel 8, Chrome 113.
| 8n4vidtmkvmk wrote:
| Worked ok for me on Android Chrome. Pixel 7
| mhandley wrote:
| Worked for me on a 2.5 year old OnePlus Nord 2T, both in Chrome
| and Firefox. Not a high frame rate, but perfectly usable, even
| on this pretty old mid-range phone.
| moondev wrote:
| It runs excellently on my nothing phone 2. What phone are you
| on?
| rd wrote:
| 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.
| dag11 wrote:
| More conventional mesh-based photogrammetry options include:
|
| - https://maps.google.com (satellite view)
|
| - https://earth.google.com (also in browser, possibly better
| camera controls for what you want)
|
| - Bing Maps (3D flyover mode, more stale data in my experience)
|
| - Apple Maps satellite view (only on macOS/iOS)
|
| - Google Earth VR[1] (requires a Windows PC and a VR headset
| that can connect to it)
|
| - Microsoft Flight Sim 2020/2024 (requires a beefy Windows PC,
| uses Bing Maps plus a lot of other enhancements and rendering
| goodness. Most lifelike "feels like I'm there" but not true to
| earth)
|
| I'm not aware of splat-based city photogrammetry aside from
| one-offs like this but I'd love to learn if there's any such
| projects!
|
| [1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/348250/Google_Earth_VR/
| whycome wrote:
| There are a couple okay apps on the Meta Quest that use the
| Google Earth API and you can fly around. It's neat. Wooorld.
| Fly. EarthQuest.
| wst_ wrote:
| 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.
| akanet wrote:
| You can use Q and E
| michaeloder wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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?
| cbeach wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Ever wondered if it's desirable BECAUSE it's not a dense urban
| jungle?
| kaonwarb wrote:
| Yes... but the climate and geography alone would make it
| highly desirable at, say, 10x density.
| gcapu wrote:
| Maybe you're right, but we'll never know. It would be great
| if they allowed some sections to develop so we can test it
| out. To me it is a desirable location because of the
| companies, not the lifestyle.
| mhh__ wrote:
| There's a difference between urban jungle and (say) nice 5
| story European city buildings.
|
| Londons problem for example is that they tried to be clever
| and cheap at the same time in the 60s and now we're stuck
| with it.
| scoofy wrote:
| This is why incrementalism is always the best method of
| development.
|
| Spread out the pain so everyone only suffers a little.
| Spread out the development across different architectural
| eras. Spread out density to the point where you have
| diminishing returns.
|
| The city shouldn't be changed overnight, but the city
| _should be allowed to change an a consistent rate that
| slowly accelerates_. A good example is to allow each
| building to only double the square footage of the median
| building within, say, a quarter-mile radius of the property
| being redeveloped. This means that SFH 's can only become
| duplexes until duplexes are the norm. After that, quad-
| plexes can be built, and then when that's normal, you start
| building large, eight-unit, european-style flats.
|
| This allows different areas to grow at different rates,
| while allowing density to remain generally uniform across
| neighborhoods. This incentivizes people who _very much
| want_ low density to have a reasonably, predictably low-
| density neighborhood to invest in, while giving up the
| ghost when a piece of land is just to valuable to
| reasonably keep low density.
|
| It would work, and would work quickly in areas where lots
| of development is needed.
| hex4def6 wrote:
| Unless I'm misunderstanding, this solves for the problem
| in which someone wants to put a skyscraper in the middle
| of suburbia. In other words, based on the assumption that
| developers will always want to build bigger, but the
| locals don't want that.
|
| Interesting to imagine what this city would look like. If
| it spread out evenly, you'd get a strange "bowl", with
| the original SFHs in the center, and high-rises on the
| periphery.
|
| I guess in reality you wouldn't have such even growth;
| high rises would still potentially want to clump together
| for business districts, etc.
|
| As buildings get torn down, you could do the
| recalculation; each new building can be x% above or below
| the local building density "slope". So over time, even
| the SFH areas could grow upwards, just at a slow pace.
| scoofy wrote:
| There are various ways to do it, but I genuinely think
| uniform is better. Low density residential likely
| prefers, and naturally supports, low density retail.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > A good example is to allow each building to only double
| the square footage of the median building within, say, a
| quarter-mile radius of the property being redeveloped.
| This means that SFH's can only become duplexes until
| duplexes are the norm.
|
| No, it doesn't; existing SFHs can, and have when allowed
| to, become duplexes, triplexes, and sometimes even
| quadruplexes _without changing square footage at all_ ,
| with doubling, you can go even further. All it takes is
| remodeling so that each subdivided unit meets minimum
| habitability standards (separate access, its own
| restroom, whatever other facilities are mininally
| required.)
| scoofy wrote:
| This is a general argument assuming units being
| arbitrary. Units should be effectively arbitrary, but
| every town will have different rules.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > This is a general argument assuming units being
| arbitrary.
|
| Well, no, it doesn't assume units are arbitrary, it
| assumes units are fixed square footage, which they are
| not. Under most regulatory schemes, there is a practical
| minimum size or a habitable unit, but a pre-existing area
| zoned for detached single-family units exclusively is
| unlikely to be comprised of single-family units that
| happen to also be the minimum square footage for a
| habitable unit.
| scoofy wrote:
| The same concept, at a minimum, would need to be extended
| to _units_. This is what I mean by assuming it's
| arbitrary. It's just redundant to say that, yes,
| obviously you need an incremental increase in units,
| sqft's, footprint, vertical footprint, etc.
| xvedejas wrote:
| Well, I desired and moved to SF exactly because it's the
| closest thing to a dense urban jungle that I could find in
| California. I even dream of moving to a denser part of the
| city one day, once I can reasonably afford it, but those
| parts are so in demand to be pricier.
| neom wrote:
| sidentoe: If you wanna live out a super dense
| dream/experience on the cheap, go spend 6 months in Seoul,
| I lived in Manhattan for 10+ years and still found Seoul
| pretty intense.
| tshaddox wrote:
| There are lots of places that are not dense urban jungles and
| are not desirable, so I'm certain your explanation is
| insufficient.
| nomel wrote:
| You're assuming some linear/symmetric relationship, by
| trying to relate an inverted sign! The more direct question
| is, are there dense urban jungles that are desirable? A
| good way to measure that might be comparing where wealthy
| people live, with the assumption that desire and price are
| related, locally. Do they live more inner-city, or do they
| live more in the suburbs at the outskirts?
| skyyler wrote:
| No. It is the good weather capital of the country.
|
| Mild winters, mild summers.
|
| Not too much rain.
|
| No serious threat from tornadoes or hurricanes.
|
| That's a very big draw and it wouldn't go away by making more
| dense housing, even if the rest of the peninsula was
| developed like Manhattan.
| twolf910616 wrote:
| Yeah...it's so close to other beautiful nature. not to
| mention two world class university near by.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| And it should be, given that they built the CBD on landfill
| which has the specific instructions of "do not shake",
| since a seemingly solid foundation turns to liquid during
| an earthquake
|
| The buildings should go somewhere else, on bedrock
| swayvil wrote:
| My first thought, sitting by the bay : Beautiful. Perfect.
| Now they just need to get rid of all these damn people.
| xipho wrote:
| And it lives on a series of incredibly active fault lines.
| During my undergrad I had multiple geology profs adamantly
| mention that when not if aspect of this, and on time-scales
| of 100s of years, not 1000s. YRMV.
| xvedejas wrote:
| My friends in the geological sciences have told me there
| will be a big earthquake, but it will be capped at around
| magnitude 8.0; the faults here are not capable of a 9.0.
| Buildings in SF have been constructed or retrofit for
| modern earthquake safety by law.
| 20after4 wrote:
| An 8.0 would still cause massive devastation. Even if
| structures mostly survive there is the threat of fire and
| tsunami. This antenna tower looks like it is likely to
| survive though.
| skyyler wrote:
| A lot of people would take earthquakes over hurricanes,
| tornadoes, blizzards, hail, 120f summers, -20f winters,
| and more.
| legitster wrote:
| SF is kind of neither though. If you spend any time in the
| city, it definitely feels overstuffed. The houses may be cute
| and small but they are stuffed with roommates. The city is
| stuck in nostalgia and ignoring that it's bursting at the
| seams. It's like wearing clothes that are too small and
| pretending you are still skinny.
| Two4 wrote:
| Kinda makes you wish there was a massive earthquake while
| everyone was safely tucked away at a Beyonce concert in an
| earthquake-proof stadium.
| mindwork wrote:
| Could it be not desirable because of single-family homes, but
| rather because all lucrative and high paying jobs are located
| here? And it's proximity to the Valley? Also there is much
| more events and gatherings happen than in the Valley.
| screye wrote:
| No? Paris, NYC, Tokyo, Singapore, Shanghai, London are all
| dense urban jungles. Doesn't stop them from being desirable.
| rz2k wrote:
| It is easy to argue that Manhattan is far more livable than
| San Francisco due to the layout and highly convenient zoning,
| even before taking the obvious transportation advantages into
| account. San Francisco's advantage is the climate and
| beautiful natural setting.
|
| Considering the advances in seismic technology made over the
| past fifty years, it is a shame that much faster upgrades to
| the real estate have not been encouraged.
| Hammershaft wrote:
| Bullshit. It's desirable because it's the tech capital of the
| planet. Is New York undesirable because it's developed
| density?
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| I would not say that SF is tech capital of the planet; I
| would give that label to Silicon Valley. There is a big
| difference in my mind.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Haha, no, it's desirable because of geography and things to
| do. This is proven by the fact that large numbers of people
| are moving into expensive Mission Bay housing which has no
| single family homes by it.
| adamiscool8 wrote:
| There would be 3-4X the people, yet still the same amount of
| roads, services, and public utilities. Why is densifying always
| seen as some unalloyed good? I constantly see this pitched as a
| plan for housing problems without the basic consideration of
| whether human beings thrive in such an unnatural environment.
|
| If you're going to force-densify anything, why not actual low-
| per-capita population areas [0] and develop mass transit, so
| North America can have the successful China city-tier model [1]
| with spread-out opportunities instead of cramming everyone
| together in one place.
|
| [0]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:California_population_map...
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_city_tier_system
| m-ee wrote:
| Public schools are closing due to lack of enrollment. Transit
| agencies are cutting back from low ridership and lack of fare
| revenue. If housing costs were low enough for more people to
| move in affordably it could be a boon for the city.
| adamiscool8 wrote:
| Maybe a boon for the city, but is definitively a boon for
| the people? Or could they be better served by building up
| another nearby town and connecting it?
| rangestransform wrote:
| There are also a lot of nearby towns already connected by
| somewhat frequent rail service that could also do well to
| densify
| what wrote:
| Public schools are closing because of DILDOs (dual income,
| little dog owners). If people aren't having children,
| there's no need for the schools.
| slater wrote:
| Not because their budgets are being slashed every year?
| what wrote:
| Why wouldn't you slash the budgets when enrollment is
| decreasing? And when you expect a 15% decrease in
| enrollment over the next 10 years?
| slater wrote:
| Chicken, egg?
| legitster wrote:
| I would not say that dense city living is not without its
| downsides. But if people need to work in these cities, they
| may as well get to live closer. And if you are already living
| in an apartment, it's not that much different to live in a 6
| story apartment building vs a 4 story one.
|
| > There would be 3-4X the people, yet still the same amount
| of roads, services, and public utilities.
|
| That's the point! Per capita, it _should_ be cheaper to live
| in cities because infrastructure goes so much further. And if
| you are arguing for better mass transit, you will have to
| build many, many more miles if you also want to encourage
| people to sprawl.
|
| Although I think the strongest case for allowing cities to
| get dense is it allows greenbelts and less dense areas closer
| to the city. You can build a big dense city UP and make it
| easier for people to get out and enjoy nature and farms and
| etc. Or you can build a city OUT and then it's just desolate
| city for hours around.
| adamiscool8 wrote:
| Is it cheaper because the infrastructure is going farther,
| or because every individual is getting less and less of an
| overburdened commons?
|
| If you build out instead and everyone gets the SFH white-
| picket-fence life, the escape to nature is suddenly less
| important. Even if it's more expensive to connect, in the
| process we develop ample capacity in the commons.
|
| Maybe it's just not possible with so much cost focus and so
| many competing incentives in the West. And no superseding
| body who can make it happen like China.
|
| Converting 4-story to 6-story isn't really what I see
| pitched either, it's generally rezoning SFH/2/4-plex to
| 6-story+ with subsidies, which is really a huge remaking of
| neighborhoods.
| TylerE wrote:
| I've been to Atlanta. A hundred miles of suburbia is not
| an improvement and is actually a dystopia.
| adamiscool8 wrote:
| Dystopia usually conjures up a neon bright towers of an
| overwhelming big city. I've been to Atlanta too and I
| quite liked it. Low density, lots of green space, decent
| public transit (MARTA). Lots of interesting neighborhood
| variability.
| TylerE wrote:
| Atlanta is beyond overwhelming big. It can literally take
| 3 hrs to drive across.
| llm_trw wrote:
| The only reason why suburbia is possible is because it is
| _heavily_ subsidized.
|
| If you had to pay the real bill for road maintenance
| alone suburbs would no longer be viable.
|
| So the suburbs take from the commons and don't give back
| in your example.
| adamiscool8 wrote:
| Would be interested in reading more about this claim, but
| it is not true for my suburb which raises plenty in
| development fees and property tax.
|
| Looking at a random SF suburb, "Pleasanton" [0] - it
| looks like 72% of their budget is funded through taxes
| and only ~7% is transfer payments.
|
| [0] https://www.cityofpleasantonca.gov/assets/our-
| government/fin...
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _Is it cheaper because the infrastructure is going
| farther_
|
| Yes, that's exactly it!
|
| > _or because every individual is getting less and less
| of an overburdened commons?_
|
| No, it's not that at all. Why would common services be
| overburdened? Everyone still gets their water, sewage,
| electricity, internet, etc., but it's _far_ cheaper to
| provide per-person.
|
| And with the density you get to build public transit, so
| people aren't burdened by having to necessarily own a
| car.
| adamiscool8 wrote:
| >Why would common services be overburdened?
|
| Water restrictions? Fatbergs? Brownouts? Congestion?
| Traffic? Breathing room? Not to mention increasing demand
| on any inelastic local supply will drive up prices. To my
| initial point, the upscaling of utilities and
| infrastructure is often magically handwaved alongside the
| up-zoning demands. There are real negatives to cramming
| more and more people into one place!
| FredPret wrote:
| Fatbergs and brownouts point to underinvestment in
| utilities (budget problems / many historic,
| undemolishable buildings)
|
| You need to keep less $ invested in infrastructure per
| person if everyone lives on top of one another in a
| condo.
|
| If everyone lives in a white picket fence SFH then you
| have to build miles of extra roads, pipes, cables. Every
| trip for every bus, truck, and car is a bit further.
|
| There's a lot to be said for both rural and city life but
| cities can be much cheaper if there's unrestrained
| development.
| rangestransform wrote:
| It's not actually handwaved when in a lot of cities, fees
| are charged to property developers to pay for the
| necessary infrastructure upgrades
| FredPret wrote:
| I enjoy both low and high density living.
|
| The argument in favour of density is that if you increase
| density, then you also decrease the average distance that
| people have to travel until they get somewhere interesting,
| like a job or a shop.
|
| Vehicle-delivered utilities like garbage collection, package
| deliveries, and mass transit get more efficient, and the same
| goes for tunnel-delivered utilities like fiber internet and
| water.
|
| San Francisco is economically one of the world's most
| impactful cities; it'd be good for all of us if there was
| more of it. You get all sorts of interesting multiplier
| effects when you put lots of a certain kind of person in one
| place.
|
| - all the theater kids in one town: LA
|
| - all the bankers: NYC, London
|
| - all the computer people: SF
| adamiscool8 wrote:
| Granted there are economic efficiencies. But I'm not
| convinced the fully expanded multipliers from one Super SF
| with 4X the density - turning it into somewhere like Manila
| - would be better across all metrics (economic and human)
| than fostering four easily interconnected mini-SFs.
| TylerE wrote:
| Have you actually checked on those Chinese cities to see how
| they're doing? Many are literal vacant ghost towns because it
| turns out people don't want to live in the middle of nowhere.
| adamiscool8 wrote:
| Not saying those don't exist but China also has like 50
| tier-3 cities significantly larger than SF. And for the
| most part, really great transit between them.
| pchristensen wrote:
| It is currently being force "low-densified" by restrictions.
| If those restrictions and force were removed, it would
| densify itself due to market demands. It would be much, much
| less forced than the current paradigm.
| protocolture wrote:
| Mass transit isnt a silver bullet either. Here in Brisbane,
| they standardized around a narrow gauge designed to pull cart
| loads of timber down mountains. They duplicate it where they
| can, but effectively its a city of technical debt. Theres a
| maximum size of train we are already at, and a maximum number
| of trains per minute we can sustain.
|
| So we have a decent mass transit system but its not far from
| peak capacity, and most of what the government has been doing
| is hacking around that. Trammish busses, cross river rail
| etc.
|
| So we need to attack the issue from the other side too. We
| have a weirdly non dense central region, largely due to
| single issue anti development voters, who dont want apartment
| buildings right where they should be (on top of mass transit
| hubs). Instead the inner suburbs are littered with 1950s
| character homes, battleaxed once for massive profit.
|
| We can take significant load off of a system close to a
| decade from collapse by simply removing outdated zoning.
|
| And the way the council here operates, utilities and road
| upgrades necessitated by development are borne by the
| property developer. So there's really near zero cost in
| approaching things this way. And they have also used priority
| approvals, where if a certain amount of floor space of a
| development is earmarked for light commercial, they can cut a
| few years off approval time. So theres absolutely no reason
| not to, as the big residential buildings grow, they grow
| their own services and utilities.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| Lol my first thought too, as a native San Franciscan who now
| lives in New York.
|
| It's a real travesty.
| bbcc90 wrote:
| true. See here for a map:
| https://sfplanninggis.s3.amazonaws.com/hub/BIGmap.pdf
|
| I live in the that space (between tower and the city) and the
| local neighbourhood group (HANC) is ridiculously NIMBY.
| rezoning is happening but it's slow going...
| parentheses wrote:
| My criticism is aimed at the glacial and mostly mishandled
| infrastructure projects. That is one of the big reasons for
| zoning changes taking so long.
|
| I hope the US gets its act together and learns from exemplar
| infrastructure projects around the world.
| physhster wrote:
| And horribly outdated and poorly built single-family homes for
| the most part...
| fuddle wrote:
| That's super cool, I like how they explain what each antenna is
| used for.
| mcstempel wrote:
| wow, this is wonderfully made
| aqueueaqueue wrote:
| Beautiful. Slow on my phone, but it is doing alot!
| toephu2 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| bastawhiz wrote:
| 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
| akanet wrote:
| the tower released some gigapixel imagery from the top at
| https://explore.sutrotower.com/
| DonHopkins wrote:
| 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!
| bentt wrote:
| That's wonderful, nice work! Love the ambient audio track.
| armchairhacker wrote:
| 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.)
| akanet wrote:
| the collision handling part is actually not that hard to back
| into from the splat data. i think HQ splats of everywhere is
| something we'll start seeing in the next decade! we haven't
| quite solved scaling issues, LoD, and streaming for splats but
| the early work is promising
| jg0r3 wrote:
| Could you direct me to resources about collisions and splat
| data?
|
| I have an extreme interest in deriving measurements from
| splat data of vegetation, as it tends to reconstruct thin
| planes like leaves far better than other traditional SfM
| techniques.
| ipsum2 wrote:
| They already are using NeRFs for Street View. (NeRF is similar
| to a Gaussian splat with different rendering trade-offs)
| https://blog.google/products/maps/sustainable-immersive-maps...
| keepamovin wrote:
| That is so cool! I really wanna do a project like this just for
| fun to understand it
| rsch wrote:
| 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.
| ghfhghg wrote:
| It doesn't seem to load on Android Chrome or Firefox. Maybe a hug
| of death?
| mortenjorck wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| aa-jv wrote:
| Indeed, you might be interested in the Artificial Museum
| project, which has managed to realize that ol' cyberpsace dream
| all over the place:
|
| https://artificialmuseum.com/
|
| For example, check the Vienna map .. so many interesting
| locations!
| gertrunde wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Domesday_Project
| czbond wrote:
| Thank you for posting this - really cool project. Also, thank you
| for sharing your splat experience and methodology.
| gameofby wrote:
| Excellent!
| chriscjcj wrote:
| 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.
| arjvik wrote:
| How'd you get this opportunity?
| chriscjcj wrote:
| I work in broadcast TV in San Francisco and am very good
| friends with one of the engineers who is responsible for the
| care and maintenance of some of the facilities up there. We
| talked about him taking me up there for ten years before we
| finally got around to it. :-)
| keepamovin wrote:
| This is great but please implement mouse look! It makes it way
| more immersive and is the lingua franca of FPS interactions.
| akanet wrote:
| You can free look with the right mouse button
| keepamovin wrote:
| Right, or with multitouch gestures on trackpad but I want
| true mouse look. Better. Pleeease!
|
| You can gate it with pointer capture API but please do it!!!!
| archagon wrote:
| My favorite structure in SF. I hope I get the chance to visit the
| top deck someday.
| mihirsahu wrote:
| This is beautiful. I didn't know about gaussian splatting, seems
| like really cool tech
| smithclay wrote:
| 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.
| jmux wrote:
| 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!
| nickvec wrote:
| 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.
| scottrogers86 wrote:
| love it. love this city, too <3
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| 30 MB! Very cool! It runs about 0.5 FPS on my iGPU but alas...
| good work anyway
| jasonjmcghee wrote:
| Very interesting. It runs seemingly flawlessly on my 3.5 year
| old iphone.
| jcarrano wrote:
| Runs perfect on my iGPU, no idea how many FPS but surely
| enough.
| deanmoriarty wrote:
| 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.
| teeeg wrote:
| Ha yes love that loop, so strange to see someone else tying it
| all together! Not quite as good but when I lived in the sunset
| -- grand view to golden heights along the ridgeline then down
| to Laguna Honda trails and up to twin peaks and out sutro
| forest to Parnassus.
| boguscoder wrote:
| Looking under the surface has its own charm
| dmazin wrote:
| 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.
| Lorin wrote:
| Sadly the controls are not mobile friendly and I ended up
| spinning wildly.
| kiririn wrote:
| Works fine on iOS safari, two finger drag to move
| kevthecoder wrote:
| 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/
| Luc wrote:
| 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?
| desdenova wrote:
| 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.
| andybak wrote:
| 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.
| akanet wrote:
| there is still some perf headroom in software to get, too!
| zokier wrote:
| 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?
| akanet wrote:
| The processing and alignment of source imagery, imo
| FinnKuhn wrote:
| 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
| franky47 wrote:
| "Good morning, and welcome to the Black Mesa transit system" is
| the first thing that popped in my head when the train started
| moving.
| chadd wrote:
| 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.
| cloudfudge wrote:
| 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.
| poutrathor wrote:
| what part is the culprit : the meta quest or the 3D
| implementation from the website ? On a classis laptop, it
| behaves well
| PaulHoule wrote:
| The quest is underpowered (it's basically a midrange Android
| phone you wear.) More efficient coding or a simpler model
| would help. _Inside the Scaniverse_ does something similar
| with a high framerate but the models are simple and don 't
| look very good.
|
| I had to power cycle mine to get out, but boy was the view
| great despite the motion sickness.
| ladon86 wrote:
| The Quest's Snapdragon GPU, like most mobile GPUs, uses a
| tiled rendering [1] architecture.
|
| The basic technique for rendering gaussian splats is
| kryptonite for this architecture, essentially implementing
| every worse practice for rendering on a mobile GPU:
|
| * Tons of overdraw (overlapping splats)
|
| * Tons of alpha blending
|
| * Millions of splats in the distance generate a lot of tiny
| triangles resolving to a single pixel
|
| * Long thin splats in the foreground generate triangles that
| cover multiple tiles
|
| These are all the ingredients you need to bring a mobile GPU
| to its knees! Any desktop GPU (including most laptops) will
| be far less sensitive to these issues, even if it's not very
| powerful. It's a fundamental issue of architecture rather
| than one of raw FLOPs.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiled_rendering
| itishappy wrote:
| Weird. Runs totally fine on Intel integrated graphics. 15-20
| fps, but starts instantly and is responsive.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| 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.
| accrual wrote:
| 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.
| jcarrano wrote:
| 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?
| kevinwang wrote:
| very nice, vincent!
| pppoe wrote:
| 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?
| tuckerpo wrote:
| Exponential back-off while zooming in is nice, but maybe reset if
| scrolling back out.
| skeeter_sky wrote:
| 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.
| amgee wrote:
| This is fantastic.
|
| I've been trying to build something myself for biological and
| heritage captures. Could you elaborate at all on the JS decoder
| method used or resources that ended up enabling you to make it?
|
| I've been playing with Playcanvas React for the past week, would
| your method integrate with their platform?
| ovenchips wrote:
| This application was built on PlayCanvas Web Components:
| https://github.com/playcanvas/web-components/
|
| It's very similar to PlayCanvas React, but with a fully Web
| Components-based architecture. You can use the same scripts
| interchangeably between both frameworks.
| amgee wrote:
| I'm assuming you started working on this before their React
| release, or was Web Components chosen for a specific reason?
|
| I'm trying to make something that can take in real-time data
| and also handle some XR/AR if possible as well, but I am
| pretty ignorant beyond html/css/js.
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