Building the Grace Cathedral experience

blog.playcanvas.com

36 points·ovenchips··6 comments

This is essentially a follow-up to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48984254

“Show HN: Immersive Gaussian Splat tour of grace cathedral, San Francisco”

262 points | 5 days ago | 63 comments

Fantastic Work!

You mentioned that "Everything beneath the Grace Cathedral experience is built on open source foundations." How feasible is it for a novice to build such an experience. Say I wanted one for my own house (should be MUCH less challenging)

The two challenges with something like this are:

1. Capturing the entire scene with photos or video and converting ("training") these into a 3d Gaussian splat. This is what Vincent did so well with Grace. Open source tools for training are Brush and Lichtfeld Studio.

2. Creating a user experience with the resulting capture. In the case of Grace it involved adding the peek effect, camera controls, moving cars etc. This was all done using PlayCanvas as the article describes, which is also open source.

There is still some art to doing 1 well, but with a capable LLM agent and our (PlayCanvas') awesome community on Discord, you could probably manage both.

Lovely to hear the choir rehearsing a psalm sung in the longstanding Anglican choral tradition (Psalm 91 to a tune by H. Walford Davies).

Having spent a lot of time in those sorts of churches, feels weird to walk right up to the altar.

I used to live just down a (very steep) block. I'd pass it on my walk to and from Trader Joe's and often stop inside. I met friends on the steps, I walked the mazes, I went to events, and I explored the building and grounds. It's very nostalgic to revisit it again. I hope I get the chance to go back to SF before too long.

Embedding the app inside the webpage is not a great idea. My PC couldn't really handle it so I couldn't read the page.

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