[HN Gopher] Skyfall-GS - Synthesizing Immersive 3D Urban Scenes ...
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Skyfall-GS - Synthesizing Immersive 3D Urban Scenes from Satellite
Imagery
Author : ChrisArchitect
Score : 143 points
Date : 2025-11-03 13:46 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (skyfall-gs.jayinnn.dev)
(TXT) w3m dump (skyfall-gs.jayinnn.dev)
| p0w3n3d wrote:
| Now the GTA: Anywhere please...
| Y_Y wrote:
| Ya, can't wait to play GTA: Nova Zemyla.
|
| In fact you wouldn't even need to be limited to earth. Why not
| throw in Google Moon and steal a moon buggy while shooting
| scientific rovers and doing cool flips out of craters?
| iammjm wrote:
| There are already 3D globes of the moon, for example with
| cesiumjs: https://sandcastle.cesium.com/?id=moon you can even
| import it to unity and other engines
| daemonologist wrote:
| Very cool; interesting how it turns all the trees into puffballs
| though. Some artifact of the pre-trained depth estimation or
| diffusion model maybe?
| voidUpdate wrote:
| "explorable" and "immersive" is definitely a bold choice of words
| when you can't really get below the level of the buildings before
| the gaussian splatting is very obvious. Sure, it's impressive
| that you can get that detailed from a few satellite images, but I
| think that might be overselling it a bit
| echelon wrote:
| We're early days. Models will soon interpolate all of that.
| Eventually in real time.
|
| I wouldn't knock the research. The results look impressive to
| me.
| Skyy93 wrote:
| We probably won't. GS is a reconstructive method, so when
| data is unavailable, you can only perform poor interpolation.
| You would need additional generative, not reconstructive,
| models. However, this would open the door to unfaithful
| augmentation again.
| echelon wrote:
| Different applications.
|
| GIS won't want generative hallucinations.
|
| Consumer mapping apps, social applications, and games (eg.
| flight sims) will want the maps to look as good as
| possible.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| GIS don't want half exploded buildings either. Nor would
| they care about photographic textures on the 3D models.
| fsloth wrote:
| You'd be surprised what GIS - or at least GIS - adjacent
| customers want. If you think about any cute-but-useless
| map detail that comes to your mind there is likely a
| paying customer for it.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| That's a matter of data, and this looks promising to me. If
| instead of satellite images they'd feed it drone shots they
| could probably get down to a level of detail that becomes
| actually immersive and would be way beyond the digital twins we
| currently have.
| Animats wrote:
| > you can't really get below the level of the buildings before
| the gaussian splatting is very obvious.
|
| True. If you bring the viewpoint down to near street level and
| look horizontally, it's worse than traditional photogrammetry
| methods.
|
| I've been looking for algorithms like this for representing
| distant regions in virtual worlds. Open Drone Map can do a good
| job, sometimes, but it really needs a cleanup pass.
| marcodiego wrote:
| This could be specially good for a world 3d model for flightgear.
| anthk wrote:
| Once Flightgear could use Google Earth assets.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Nice, but when you look up close things like this and Google
| Earth look like a post-apocalyptic scene :)
|
| It would be amazing if they could also take user-generated photos
| and videos at ground level and accurate mapping data (that has
| building outlines) and clean that up to something presentable.
|
| I mean, what they do here is what google and apple are already
| doing for years. It's time for the next step.
| zokier wrote:
| > I mean, what they do here is what google and apple are
| already doing for years
|
| This is gaussian splatting. I'm pretty confident that
| google/apple have not done that.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Oh I didn't realise it was a different technique but the
| result is similarly bad when zoomed in :(
| Mobius01 wrote:
| This would be the next step for flight simulators, which while
| remarkable still require handmade assets for accurate details.
| zokier wrote:
| afaik msfs uses partially automatically generated 3d assets
| (from Bing Maps?) from aerial/satellite imagery.
| Stevvo wrote:
| MSFS 2024 already does photogrammetry from satellite photos.
| However, it builds triangle geometry much like is done from
| aerial photography, because gaussian splats are not suitable
| for games; you can't build collision geometry from a gaussian
| splat for example.
| mtharrison wrote:
| Maybe dumb question but how do I just take a sat image and create
| the scene? The scripts in the repo are all about training which I
| assume requires you to have the 3d data too.
|
| These sort of projects always look cool but I think the real "wow
| factor" would be a file upload where you can see the result on
| your image. I assume there are reasons why this isn't done.
| pedalpete wrote:
| Do you mean converting your image into a 3D scene?
|
| This is where we were heading with our 3D volumetric video
| company https://ayvri.com
|
| We were working on blending 3D satellite imagery with your
| ground view (or low flying in the case of paragliders) photos
| and videos to create a 3D scene.
|
| Our technology was acquired prior to us being able to fully
| realize the vision (and we moved on to another project).
| aaroninsf wrote:
| Re: utility in games,
|
| I suspect hybrid solutions will remove the limitations of GS,
| with (eventually...) some smooth hand off. Do clean-enough GS
| like this; then hand the output to other systems which covert
| into forms more useful for your application and which adopt e.g.
| textures from localized photos etc.
|
| It's just a bit of engineering and compute...
| Qworg wrote:
| While the methodology wasn't published, Microsoft did something
| similar for Flight Simulator.
|
| https://www.smithsonianmag.com/air-space-magazine/flight-box...
| rkomorn wrote:
| If you want to dig more, I suspect Microsoft got a lot (if not
| all) of it from blackshark.ai . They're one of the companies
| whose logo shows up during game start.
|
| I knew their name because, when I worked for an Airbus
| subsidiary, we talked with them about a solution to generate 3D
| environments for any/every airport.
|
| They had some cool stuff but also some wonky stuff at the time
| (like highway overpasses actually being rendered as walls
| across the highway).
| Stevvo wrote:
| blackshark.ai was used for generating building models with
| textured facades from footprints. Their thing for generating
| airports was actually not used in MSFS. The photogrammetry
| from satellite photos in MSFS 2024 was done by Maxar
| Technologies.
| rkomorn wrote:
| Ah, neat. How do you know this?
|
| And also, was it any different for MSFS 2020?
| Stevvo wrote:
| My side-project is working on addons, so I spend a lot of
| time with Flight Simulator. 2020 didn't have the
| photogrammetry from satellite photos, only from aerial
| photos in major cities. The blackshark buildings are used
| wherever they don't have any photogrammetry available.
| rkomorn wrote:
| Neat (again :) ).
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Is there any reason that this couldn't integrate Street View
| data?
| fsloth wrote:
| For production scenarios data like that usually has a hefty
| license fee. Hence it's interesting to find methods for scene
| generation from data that is cheaper to acquire.
| thicknavyrain wrote:
| This is so cool. I used to work on urban heat island analysis and
| now work in natural catastrophe modelling, and in both cases
| knowing the average heights/volumes of buildings is a very handy
| thing to have but is surprisingly difficult information to
| retrieve. Even a coarse estimate available at annual resolution
| has some really awesome use cases, very excited to see this.
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| It looks good! I imagine a reasonable next step might be to do
| something about the cars, which are omnipresent in urban scenes
| but seem like they've been left a blurry mess in the examples.
| nevster wrote:
| I'm probably in a minority here. When I read Skyfall-GS, I
| immediately thought it was some new Apple IIGS game!
| EagnaIonat wrote:
| Pretty cool. Interesting that the shadows become 3 dimensional
| objects as well.
| r0x0r007 wrote:
| Seems like it could also be useful in planning combat(strategic)
| actions ad hoc, given limited resources, but I guess military
| already has some other tech for this...
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(page generated 2025-11-04 23:02 UTC)