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!
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.
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!
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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It's free on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-Jrp6it9Ss
https://artificialmuseum.com/
For example, check the Vienna map .. so many interesting locations!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Domesday_Project
If you want GS news, https://radiancefields.com/ reports a lot of advances all the time.
This captured that serenity.
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/
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynth