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Show HN: Immersive Gaussian Splat experience of Sutro Tower, San Francisco

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Re: Show HN: Immersive Gaussian Splat experience of Sutro Tower, San Francisco

#61

Post by legitster »

adamiscool8 wrote: post #56
legitster wrote: post #28

Completely 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…

I would not say that dense city living is not without its downsides. But if people need to work in these cities, they may as well get to live closer. And if you are already living in an apartment, it's not that much different to live in a 6 story apartment building vs a 4 story one.

> There would be 3-4X the people, yet still the same amount of roads, services, and public utilities.

That's the point! Per capita, it should be cheaper to live in cities because infrastructure goes so much further. And if you are arguing for better mass transit, you will have to build many, many more miles if you also want to encourage people to sprawl.

Although I think the strongest case for allowing cities to get dense is it allows greenbelts and less dense areas closer to the city. You can build a big dense city UP and make it easier for people to get out and enjoy nature and farms and etc. Or you can build a city OUT and then it's just desolate city for hours around.

Re: Show HN: Immersive Gaussian Splat experience of Sutro Tower, San Francisco

#62

Post by mhandley »

IshKebab wrote: post #23

This does not work at all on Android Chrome. The about dialog flies in super slowly, continually re-layouting the text, and there's no "small cube" and no way to dismiss the about dialog either. The background looks tantalising but maybe a little more testing is needed... (e.g. for the most common browser/OS in the world).

Worked for me on a 2.5 year old OnePlus Nord 2T, both in Chrome and Firefox. Not a high frame rate, but perfectly usable, even on this pretty old mid-range phone.

Re: Show HN: Immersive Gaussian Splat experience of Sutro Tower, San Francisco

#63

Post by FredPret »

adamiscool8 wrote: post #56
legitster wrote: post #28

Completely 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…

I enjoy both low and high density living.

The argument in favour of density is that if you increase density, then you also decrease the average distance that people have to travel until they get somewhere interesting, like a job or a shop.

Vehicle-delivered utilities like garbage collection, package deliveries, and mass transit get more efficient, and the same goes for tunnel-delivered utilities like fiber internet and water.

San Francisco is economically one of the world's most impactful cities; it'd be good for all of us if there was more of it. You get all sorts of interesting multiplier effects when you put lots of a certain kind of person in one place.

- all the theater kids in one town: LA

- all the bankers: NYC, London

- all the computer people: SF

Re: Show HN: Immersive Gaussian Splat experience of Sutro Tower, San Francisco

#64

Post by twolf910616 »

skyyler wrote: post #57
cbeach wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Ever wondered if it’s desirable BECAUSE it’s not a dense urban jungle?

No. It is the good weather capital of the country. Mild winters, mild summers. Not too much rain. No serious threat from tornadoes or hurricanes. That’s a very big draw and it wouldn’t go away by making more dense housing, even if the rest of the peninsula was developed like Manhattan.

Yeah...it's so close to other beautiful nature. not to mention two world class university near by.

Re: Show HN: Immersive Gaussian Splat experience of Sutro Tower, San Francisco

#65

Post by neom »

xvedejas wrote: post #51
cbeach wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Ever wondered if it’s desirable BECAUSE it’s not a dense urban jungle?

Well, I desired and moved to SF exactly because it's the closest thing to a dense urban jungle that I could find in California. I even dream of moving to a denser part of the city one day, once I can reasonably afford it, but those parts are so in demand to be pricier.

sidentoe: If you wanna live out a super dense dream/experience on the cheap, go spend 6 months in Seoul, I lived in Manhattan for 10+ years and still found Seoul pretty intense.

Re: Show HN: Immersive Gaussian Splat experience of Sutro Tower, San Francisco

#66

Post by bastawhiz »

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.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynth

Re: Show HN: Immersive Gaussian Splat experience of Sutro Tower, San Francisco

#67

Post by scoofy »

mhh__ wrote: post #48
cbeach wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Ever wondered if it’s desirable BECAUSE it’s not a dense urban jungle?

There's a difference between urban jungle and (say) nice 5 story European city buildings. Londons problem for example is that they tried to be clever and cheap at the same time in the 60s and now we're stuck with it.

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 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. After that, quad-plexes can be built, and then when that's normal, you start building large, eight-unit, european-style flats.

This allows different areas to grow at different rates, while allowing density to remain generally uniform across neighborhoods. This incentivizes people who very much want low density to have a reasonably, predictably low-density neighborhood to invest in, while giving up the ghost when a piece of land is just to valuable to reasonably keep low density.

It would work, and would work quickly in areas where lots of development is needed.

Re: Show HN: Immersive Gaussian Splat experience of Sutro Tower, San Francisco

#68

Post by akanet »

bastawhiz wrote: post #66

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 Photo…

the tower released some gigapixel imagery from the top at https://explore.sutrotower.com/

Re: Show HN: Immersive Gaussian Splat experience of Sutro Tower, San Francisco

#69

Post by adamiscool8 »

legitster wrote: post #61
adamiscool8 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I would not say that dense city living is not without its downsides. But if people need to work in these cities, they may as well get to live closer. And if you are already living in an apartment, it's not that much different to live in a 6 story apartment building vs a 4 story one. > There would be 3-4X the people, yet still the same amount of roads, services, and public utilities. That's the point! Per capita, it s…

Is it cheaper because the infrastructure is going farther, or because every individual is getting less and less of an overburdened commons?

If you build out instead and everyone gets the SFH white-picket-fence life, the escape to nature is suddenly less important. Even if it's more expensive to connect, in the process we develop ample capacity in the commons.

Maybe it's just not possible with so much cost focus and so many competing incentives in the West. And no superseding body who can make it happen like China.

Converting 4-story to 6-story isn't really what I see pitched either, it's generally rezoning SFH/2/4-plex to 6-story+ with subsidies, which is really a huge remaking of neighborhoods.

Re: Show HN: Immersive Gaussian Splat experience of Sutro Tower, San Francisco

#70

Post by TylerE »

adamiscool8 wrote: post #56
legitster wrote: post #28

Completely 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…

Have you actually checked on those Chinese cities to see how they’re doing? Many are literal vacant ghost towns because it turns out people don’t want to live in the middle of nowhere.
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