MatterPort Demo of Taliesin West | Hacker News Reader

MatterPort Demo of Taliesin West

my.matterport.com

27 pointsdedalus10 comments

For anyone else that's curious Taliesin West is the winter home and architectural school of renowned architect Frank Lloyd Wright.

I just love how his buildings lay comfortably and organically on the landscape and Matterport's 3D rendering does a great job of showing this.

Off-topic: I'm not an architecture buff and still found the (not-too-cheap) tour of Taliesin West well worth the time and money. Worth considering if you're ever in Scottsdale AZ.

The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation just released a collaboration with an art gallery, Spoke Art (SF), called Timeless, a collection of WPA-style posters by local and international artists. I went to the exhibit when it was at Taliesin West a few weeks ago and ended up buying 2 of the posters to hang in my room. There are 2 more exhibits in the future, one at Taliesin East and one in Spoke Art's sister gallery in NYC. Here is the first of 3 collections for anyone interested: https://spoke-art.com/collections/frank-lloyd-wright-timeles...

Also worth visiting in Scottsdale (not far away, and historically related) is Cosanti, which is free.

Paolo Soleri is a really interesting character

Yes, Cosanti's definitely interesting. As is Arcosanti itself, if you can spare the time to drive out there (on the way from Phoenix to points north).

https://arcosanti.org/

https://arcosanti.org/visit/cosanti/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcosanti

> Paolo Soleri is a really interesting character

'Tis true. I worked with him fairly closely for five years (1992-1997), so knew him well. Happy to do an AMA for anyone who's interested in the subject.

This is kinda cool, and better than nothing, especially for their target markets like real estate, but I cannot for a second believe that this is the best UX for browsing the 3D space. It's slow, it's clunky, the transitions look poor, and I struggle to get a "feel" for the 3D space in any useful way. It seems to be a straight clone of the Google Street View interface, and that was one with many more restrictions on the data at a scale far larger. There must be improvements possible here!

It's interesting about the 3D space part. I totally agree. Having visited Taliesin West in person, there's one unique part you would notice right away if you were there but can't with the 3D model: the height of the ceilings. The ceilings there were very low, and it was kind of strange being in there as a fairly tall person (~6ft). Kind of like being in a hobbit hole.

This sucker ate 3GB RAM in Firefox, and hung at 75%.

What's it supposed to do?

Edit: Oh, https://matterport.com/. Not the thing to load in a wimpy VM, using a high-latency uplink.

It's like Quicktime VR.

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