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

Overall reception and atmosphere

• Strongly positive response to the visual quality; many describe it as gorgeous, nostalgic, or like looking out a real window over SF.
• The music and ambient audio are frequently praised for enhancing the mood, even evoking memories of living or working in the city.
• Several people compare it to the 90s/early-2000s “virtual museum / Encarta / Domesday” vision of cyberspace and see this as a realization of that idea.

Technical implementation and Gaussian splats

• Viewers are impressed that such fidelity and interactivity fit into ~30 MB and run well even on integrated GPUs and older phones.
• Some notice artifacts: “uncanny valley” geometry quirks, needle-like spikes at distance, flickering when moving, and translucency when very close.
• There’s interest in automatically converting splats into more regular 3D geometry (meshes or convex primitives) and references to convex splatting and NeRF-based systems.
• The author shares CPU and GPU JS decoders and notes that processing/alignment of source imagery is the main detail limiter.
• Discussion touches on potential for collision extraction from splats and use in city-scale models, games, VR, and AI training; scaling, LOD, and streaming are described as open challenges but promising.

Performance and device behavior

• Desktop browsers generally handle it smoothly; Firefox initially hit an import assertions error that was quickly fixed.
• Android performance is mixed: some report sluggish UI or initial unusability, others say it works fine on midrange phones.
• On Meta Quest, the scene is visually stunning but can severely overload the GPU, causing low framerates and discomfort; commenters explain that naive splat rendering is hostile to tiled mobile GPUs, though optimized Quest demos exist.

Controls and UX feedback

• People request true FPS-style mouse look, less disorienting camera jumps when clicking hotspots, and clearer mobile touch behavior.
• Some are confused by the “little cube” AR hint and by dismissing the about dialog; others note undocumented shortcuts like Q/E vertical movement and right-button free look.

Sutro Tower, broadcasting, and urbanism tangents

• Many share affection for Sutro as a landmark, plus anecdotes about visiting the tower, RF power near antennas, and OTA broadcast TV’s technical and policy details (US unencrypted ATSC vs encrypted DVB-T elsewhere).
• A large subthread debates SF’s low-density zoning, comparing it to denser cities, discussing incremental upzoning, infrastructure burdens, suburbs vs urban cores, and demographic shifts (schools, transit, “subsidized suburbia”).