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

I had to power cycle mine to get out, but boy was the view great despite the motion sickness.

The basic technique for rendering gaussian splats is kryptonite for this architecture, essentially implementing every worse practice for rendering on a mobile GPU:

* Tons of overdraw (overlapping splats)

* Tons of alpha blending

* Millions of splats in the distance generate a lot of tiny triangles resolving to a single pixel

* Long thin splats in the foreground generate triangles that cover multiple tiles

These are all the ingredients you need to bring a mobile GPU to its knees! Any desktop GPU (including most laptops) will be far less sensitive to these issues, even if it's not very powerful. It's a fundamental issue of architecture rather than one of raw FLOPs.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiled_rendering

TIL — very cool work!

I'm trying to make something that can take in real-time data and also handle some XR/AR if possible as well, but I am pretty ignorant beyond html/css/js.

I have an extreme interest in deriving measurements from splat data of vegetation, as it tends to reconstruct thin planes like leaves far better than other traditional SfM techniques.

You can gate it with pointer capture API but please do it!!!!

I tried again today and it's still really slow but I do get the controls this time so I was able to use it. Very neat!

This is on a Pixel 8, Chrome 113.

The video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7-3CKulsCc

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.

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.

Considering the advances in seismic technology made over the past fifty years, it is a shame that much faster upgrades to the real estate have not been encouraged.

> 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.

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

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.