If you’ve lived in San Francisco for a while, you may have gotten curious about the big red triangular tower at the top of Twin Peaks. Most of us know that it’s called Sutro Tower, and that it has something to do with broadcasting TV and radio signals for the Bay Area.
I thought it would be nice to bring San Franciscans closer to our most prominent landmark with a really beautiful model of the tower that you can fly through at your own pace. You’ll notice a lot of little tidbits if you click on the blue circles: Where you can take a tiny elevator for the eight-minute trip up the tower, how the tower’s 3.5 million pounds of steel are designed to twist (slightly) in the wind, and which antenna belongs to KQED vs. KRON 4, among others.
If you’re on a phone, you can go full-screen by clicking the icon, but the model is best experienced on a computer.
If you have trouble loading the model on this page, you can also try viewing it directly.
This scan is made possible by recent advances in Gaussian splatting. This is an emerging technology that lets us quickly create very detailed models just from photographs. For this model (or splat, as we call them), my friend Daylen and I flew our drones around Sutro Tower at a respectful distance for an afternoon until we had collected a few thousand photographs.
I then aligned these pictures in free software called RealityCapture. Alignment is the process that teaches the computer that a bunch of points in different images all actually correspond with the same point in real life. Then I used another piece of free software called gsplat to produce the 3D model itself.
Normally, these models would be too large to share with you easily, but thanks to advances in the last year, we’ve developed new compression techniques. This model only weighs about 30 megabytes, which is about the same as a couple minutes of TikTok video!
Sutro Tower is a wonderful building, and I hope you enjoy learning a bit about it here. If you want to learn more, check out the much more thorough official digital tour.
So amazing. My son and I learned a ton and it was such a great substitute for our usual bedtime stories.
Assuming you are the same Vincent behind Tunnel Vision, I want to thank you for creating some of the most hypnotic and enlightening ‘videos’ of recent times! I applaud your work, consider myself a fan and am excited to learn about all that you do in the realm! Terrific stuff and legendary!
This is very cool, and thank you for explaining the technology behind it, very interesting.
I wanted to share this link to a couple photographs from the top of sutro tower in 1978 that I stumbled upon online some time ago , on the “an ambitious project collapsing” blog (not sure if links are allowed but if you google the name of the blog + sutro tower a page will come up that has this post on it)
https://anambitiousprojectcollapsing.com/aapc/ambitiousprojectcollapsing.com/2010/03/photos-from-top-of-sutro-tower-in-san.html
Cool
Awesome. This is great, thanks for sharing.