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)

• 3D
• San Francisco
• Vincent Woo