30 MB! Very cool! It runs about 0.5 FPS on my iGPU but alas... good work anyway
Show HN: Immersive Gaussian Splat experience of Sutro Tower, San Francisco
131–140 of 198 posts
Re: Show HN: Immersive Gaussian Splat experience of Sutro Tower, San Francisco
#132I had the privilege of spending about 30 minutes at level 6 in May of 2023. It was as spectacular as you might imagine. I would say that if you have even the slightest fear of heights the whole experience would be a nightmare.
How’d you get this opportunity?
Re: Show HN: Immersive Gaussian Splat experience of Sutro Tower, San Francisco
#13330 MB! Very cool! It runs about 0.5 FPS on my iGPU but alas... good work anyway
Very interesting. It runs seemingly flawlessly on my 3.5 year old iphone.
Re: Show HN: Immersive Gaussian Splat experience of Sutro Tower, San Francisco
#134I had the privilege of spending about 30 minutes at level 6 in May of 2023. It was as spectacular as you might imagine. I would say that if you have even the slightest fear of heights the whole experience would be a nightmare.
How’d you get this opportunity?
I work in broadcast TV in San Francisco and am very good friends with one of the engineers who is responsible for the care and maintenance of some of the facilities up there. We talked about him taking me up there for ten years before we finally got around to it. :-)
Re: Show HN: Immersive Gaussian Splat experience of Sutro Tower, San Francisco
#135Completely unrelated, but aerial views of San Francisco blow my mind with how under-zoned the city is. One of the most desirable places on earth to live and it's on a small peninsula. Yet it's a sea of single-family homes as far as the eye can see. The distance between Sutro Tower and the "Downtown" SF is less than the distance between the Brooklyn Bridge and Central Park. But could you imagine if that space was fill…
There would be 3-4X the people, yet still the same amount of roads, services, and public utilities. Why is densifying always seen as some unalloyed good? I constantly see this pitched as a plan for housing problems without the basic consideration of whether human beings thrive in such an unnatural environment. If you're going to force-densify anything, why not actual low-per-capita population areas [0] and develop ma…
Mass transit isnt a silver bullet either. Here in Brisbane, they standardized around a narrow gauge designed to pull cart loads of timber down mountains. They duplicate it where they can, but effectively its a city of technical debt. Theres a maximum size of train we are already at, and a maximum number of trains per minute we can sustain.
So we have a decent mass transit system but its not far from peak capacity, and most of what the government has been doing is hacking around that. Trammish busses, cross river rail etc.
So we need to attack the issue from the other side too. We have a weirdly non dense central region, largely due to single issue anti development voters, who dont want apartment buildings right where they should be (on top of mass transit hubs). Instead the inner suburbs are littered with 1950s character homes, battleaxed once for massive profit.
We can take significant load off of a system close to a decade from collapse by simply removing outdated zoning.
And the way the council here operates, utilities and road upgrades necessitated by development are borne by the property developer. So there's really near zero cost in approaching things this way. And they have also used priority approvals, where if a certain amount of floor space of a development is earmarked for light commercial, they can cut a few years off approval time. So theres absolutely no reason not to, as the big residential buildings grow, they grow their own services and utilities.
Re: Show HN: Immersive Gaussian Splat experience of Sutro Tower, San Francisco
#136Does anything like this exist for just flying around cities (not SF, anywhere) in general? Would love to experience what a drone sees even if it's in a limited area.
There are a couple okay apps on the Meta Quest that use the Google Earth API and you can fly around. It's neat. Wooorld. Fly. EarthQuest.
Re: Show HN: Immersive Gaussian Splat experience of Sutro Tower, San Francisco
#137Very beautiful and nostalgic, so well done.
I used to live nearby and my favorite “urban” hike was going up Glen Canyon, up and down the two Twin Peaks, loop through Sutro Forest and then go back to downtown walking down 17th. Loved those weekend walks.
Re: Show HN: Immersive Gaussian Splat experience of Sutro Tower, San Francisco
#138Re: Show HN: Immersive Gaussian Splat experience of Sutro Tower, San Francisco
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is why incrementalism is always the best method of development. Spread out the pain so everyone only suffers a little. Spread out the development across different architectural eras. Spread out density to the point where you have diminishing returns. The city shouldn't be changed overnight, but the city should be allowed to change an a consistent rate that slowly accelerates . A good example is to allow each bui…
> A good example is to allow each building to only double the square footage of the median building within, say, a quarter-mile radius of the property being redeveloped. This means that SFH's can only become duplexes until duplexes are the norm. No, it doesn't; existing SFHs can, and have when allowed to, become duplexes, triplexes, and sometimes even quadruplexes without changing square footage at all , with doublin…
This is a general argument assuming units being arbitrary. Units should be effectively arbitrary, but every town will have different rules.
Re: Show HN: Immersive Gaussian Splat experience of Sutro Tower, San Francisco
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is why incrementalism is always the best method of development. Spread out the pain so everyone only suffers a little. Spread out the development across different architectural eras. Spread out density to the point where you have diminishing returns. The city shouldn't be changed overnight, but the city should be allowed to change an a consistent rate that slowly accelerates . A good example is to allow each bui…
Unless I'm misunderstanding, this solves for the problem in which someone wants to put a skyscraper in the middle of suburbia. In other words, based on the assumption that developers will always want to build bigger, but the locals don't want that. Interesting to imagine what this city would look like. If it spread out evenly, you'd get a strange "bowl", with the original SFHs in the center, and high-rises on the per…
There are various ways to do it, but I genuinely think uniform is better. Low density residential likely prefers, and naturally supports, low density retail.