Grace Cathedral Tour - Immersive Gaussian Splat 3D experience
Show HN: Immersive Gaussian Splat tour of grace cathedral, San Francisco
Step inside the historic Grace Cathedral in San Francisco with this groundbreaking immersive tour powered by Gaussian Splat technology. Created by Vincent Woo and built on the PlayCanvas engine, this project offers a photorealistic, interactive 3D reconstruction of the iconic landmark. It solves the challenge of digital preservation by allowing users to explore intricate architectural details from anywhere in the world. Backed by early prototyping from World Labs, this experience sets a new standard for how we can virtually visit and protect historic locations, blending cutting-edge computer vision with cultural heritage.
If you have a connection to a historic location that could benefit from digital preservation, please feel free to email Vincent.
- wxw
From OP's prior work scanning Sutro Tower in SF: https://vincentwoo.com/2025/02/18/sutro-tower-in-3d/.
> 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.
I'm assuming this was done similarly. Very cool.
- ACCount37
The cathedral is the star of the show, but I found myself more fascinated by all the incidental little details captured in this. Like the trees and the buildings nearby, the basketball court, the little solar panel on the side, the apartment towers.
It's like seeing the promise of Google Street View realized.
The technology is in such an early stage and it already slaps this hard.
Wonder what the next steps are for this tech? "Un-splatting" optimizations to convert things like flat surfaces into classic rigid textured geometry? Factoring the lighting away from the geometry? Filling the pipeline with AI tooling - segmentation to remove the "variables" like humans automatically, generative AI to fill in the missing non-semantic details based on the surroundings, more generative AI to "port" the data from things like public high resolution images of plaques or other undercaptured details into the scene?
Seeing this kind of reconstruction now makes me very excited for what the 3D environments of the future are going to be like.
- ggm
Reminded me of a VRML demonstrator inside Notre Dame from decades ago. Different approach, similar outcome. (it used surface texture mapping inside a game engine from my memory)
A lot more architecture would benefit from being available like this splat model. The Pharonic tombs which you can visit in google/other virtual tourism are good, but this is also good!
- neilk
It’s beautifully done. A few questions
I noticed that complex patterns - marble, some paintings, some stained glass - are rendered in what seems like stretched, hazy ellipses. Is that the fundamental building block of a splat?
Also, I was interested if any specularity would be captured by the splat. Or any other aspect of the building which shifts from viewpoint - like lights reflected on the marble floor, or where a metal element outdoors is reflecting the sun but only from one vantage point. I didn’t see that. As I understand it, splats are a kind of solution to the “problem” posed by the series of photos so they are capable of capturing that sort of thing. Is that present here, and I missed it? Or is that something that you need a lot of processing power for, to generate a more complex solution for the light fields?
- suejunghuh0
Gsplat is indeed the future for graphics. Handling much more detail in mobile hardware spec. Check this work too. (Not mine) https://demo.immersivetech.ch/chateau-la-sarraz/