Hacker News Reader

Comment by jakewelch | Hacker News Reader

Hey this is my project. Thanks for sharing

Wow this is amazing! I had a habit of visiting the nicest bathroom I can find (typically 5 star hotel lobbies) while traveling. I took some photos of a couple a long way back, but never even thought to use something like LIDAR. I was thinking of using them as a coffee table book with the title "The Best Places To Go".

So from a fellow public bathroom enthusiast, I wholeheartedly thank you for this project. I travel much less these days, but if I'm ever in a nice bathroom I'll see if I can get a scan to work and upload it!

Thank you for making it! This is an incredible project so I hope to see (and contribute!) more scans. Also just a really well-crafted website in general, functionally and aesthetically. You mentioned looking at "standard design conventions used for other web archives and for designing public signage for ADA compliant restrooms" in another comment — any interesting design decisions from that research?

Yeah! It lead me to design the UI to be very simple with a clear hierarchy, high contrast, and using a sans-serif font. Accessibility and legibility is key. I landed on using Arial as the font because it's arguably the most accessible. Beyond that, my research drove the language I use throughout. "Catalog", for example, used to be "Index". or calling comments "annotations". It's funny, something about the subject matter being so stupid made me want to go really hard on taking the archive itself 100% seriously.

It would be fun to have this connected to other world mapping projects such as Panoramax which is a federated alternative to Google Street View.

https://panoramax.fr/

Cool project! I wanted to make something similar, but for archiving bathroom graffiti! Yours is a better implementation than I would've accomplished though, so I'm glad you did it!

What was your original goal(s) for the effort?

I love this so much.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com