Ever wonder what it would be like to fly around San Francisco's iconic Sutro Tower? Vincent Woo (founder of CoderPad) teamed up with his buddy Daylen to fly drones around the landmark and captured a few thousand photos. The result is this gorgeous 3D Gaussian Splat that lets you orbit, fly through, and explore the massive broadcasting tower up close. There are educational annotations sprinkled throughout that teach you about the tower's history and how it works, plus an AR mode if you want to walk around it on your phone. It's basically a love letter to one of the Bay Area's most recognizable structures.

What makes this technically interesting is the pipeline Vincent used to get from raw drone footage to a web-ready splat. He aligned the photos in RealityCapture, trained the scene using gsplat, then compressed it with SOGS (Self-Organizing Gaussians). The whole model sits at just ~30MB, which is wild when you consider how detailed it is. That compression is thanks to some recent advances in Gaussian Splatting tech and PlayCanvas's custom decoder implementation. Vincent worked directly with the PlayCanvas team to get the new compressed format working, so you're seeing some cutting-edge stuff here.

If you want to dig deeper, Vincent wrote a detailed blog post about the capture and processing workflow. The project itself is best experienced on desktop where you can really fly through the scene (WASD controls), but mobile works great too. It's a neat example of how Gaussian Splatting is starting to make photorealistic 3D scanning accessible enough that someone can just... do it for a local landmark they care about. Worth checking out both for the tech and the view.