The Sutro Tower in 3D
This is an amazingly realistic 3D model of San Francisco’s Sutro Tower that you can zoom, pan, fly through, and interact with. This model was made using a technique called Gaussian splatting; creator Vincent Woo explains:
This scan is made possible by recent advances in Gaussian Splatting. This is an emerging technology that lets us quickly create very detailed models just from photographs. For this model (or splat, as we call them), my friend Daylen and I flew our drones around Sutro Tower at a respectful distance for an afternoon until we had collected a few thousand photographs.
I then aligned these pictures in free software called RealityCapture. Alignment is the process that teaches the computer that a bunch of points in different images all actually correspond with the same point in real life. Then I used another piece of free software called gsplat to produce the 3D model itself.
The model looks amazing…I can’t believe it’s just stitched-together photos. (via @biddul.ph)
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"Just stitched together photos" has been a thing for years, if not decades, called photogrammetry. I guess GSplats are a refinement of this but it'd be nice to see something about how rather than asserting it's something brand new.
@Pete A.: This is much different from classic photogrammetry, which essentially triangulates distinctive points. This is a form of real-time radiance field rendering, in which a whole lot of photos are used to train a neural network to estimate how a scene looks from an arbitrary viewpoint. It doesn't just estimate geometry: it handles reflection, refraction, glare, and other light effects. Also it's designed to render in realtime on a mainstream GPU.
Ah. that makes sense. Thank you. (And sorry for the grumpy tone.)
Very fun to play around with - I ended up trying to get to the bottom then zooming up through the tour - then scrolling back down I ended up reversing all the way through the grass and to a "bird's eye" view of the tower and San Francisco but from underground. Reminded me a bit of those videos where they peel back the layers of a video game.
I can see my house from here!
This is a little slice of heaven.
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