If you want to see more examples of Gaussian splats that people are making, check out PlayCanvas' new gallery superspl.at!

One reason I made this is because I think Gaussian splats are the future and I think we can be embedding these into all kinds of immersive experiences. I think newsrooms should be making and using these for storytelling even in same-day beat reporting.

There are a lot of fun annotations embedded in the scene, and also one little easter egg. Let me know if you find it.

The biggest challenge I had was trying to color match images taken on four different sensors at different times of day, which gsplat's bilateral grid feature does a very good job of handling. Pictured is an early failure from PostShot.

To build the model, @daylen.bsky.social
and I flew drones around the tower and took thousands of files. I then somewhat laboriously aligned these images in RealityCapture

I implemented a JS decoder for a recent compression scheme for splats called Self Organizing Gaussians (fraunhoferhhi.github.io/Self-Organiz...) that leverages classic image codecs. It brings the size of the scene down to under 30MB!

The experience is all on the web (vincentwoo.com/3d/sutro_tower) and it should work well on phones, too.

thanks for the shoutout