
Walk through a 3D model of Y Combinator - wildpeaks
https://matterport.com/blog/walk-3d-model-y-combinator
======
zan2434
Looks like the 3D model is just for navigating the street-view-like set of
panoramic photospheres. It's so far a necessary compromise, to get much more
realistic photos before you can have perfect structure, material and lighting
capture/rendering. (the benefit is clear looking at their scan of the old yc
building), but if this is to be useful with VR (and it definitely would be)
they'll need something in between those panoramic photospheres.

~~~
mintplant
I couldn't help but notice that it doesn't let you zoom in on the "dollhouse"
view, i.e. the one actually showing the 3D model. No way to see how these
models look up close.

This'll work great for navigating buildings—I can imagine it being a hit with
real-estate sites—but the hiding of detail in the 3D view suggests the tech
wouldn't work as well for other applications, like VR. (I'd love to be wrong
here, though!)

~~~
haeric
The dollhouse view is actually a low detail version of the 3d model, with low
resolution textures, it's just really not meant for a close inspection :) Load
time and performance has been high priority for us, particularly because we
also support mobile devices. We might do something like streaming in higher
quality mesh/textures in the future, and allow closer inspection.

As for VR... we're playing around with it a whole lot, and it actually looks
really great! Hopefully it'll get in front of more people somehow soon.

~~~
dyarosla
As a second ask, why does the dollhouse view have all the noise and random
parts of the ceiling visible? It makes it difficult to navigate to 'see
through' to the ground, and I would suspect just cutting the ceiling off
completely would make for a better visualization.

~~~
haeric
It's actually harder than it seems to cut off the ceiling, houses may have all
sorts of weird heights, angles and corners, doors, arches... Any simple
solution might work for 80-90% of models, but our viewer has to work for 100%.
So we only remove faces with backface culling currently, we're going to do
better soon though :)

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barrystaes
Tssk. They should fix the misleading "model" illustrations.. the 2012 is a
render, the 2014 is a photo!

Duplicate of
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8524360](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8524360)

~~~
gadders
I think the "Dolls House" view is a render.

TBH I just want to know when it auto-compiles into Doom WAD files (or the
modern equivalent) so I can run through famous buildings shooting monsters.

~~~
nailer
You could bring in the entire .object into Unreal Engine first person template
right now. Having whole rooms as models (rather than BSP brushes) is actually
pretty common now. You might have to fix lightmaps and maybe make a low poly
version first.

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bemmu
I got curious how much space it would take to have enough spherical panoramas
of the YC office to walk freely around it like in a first person shooter game.
No 3D model involved, just a panorama for every possible position the user
might want to walk to.

I think 60 frames per second would be smooth enough. Walking speed 5km/hour is
roughly 1 meter/second. Per frame distance then is about 0.02 meters.

Looking at the map the YC office seems to be about 30 x 40 meters. Imagining a
grid with lines each 0.02 meters overlaid on it, it seems you would need
3000000 panoramas. That might sound way too many, but wait! We live in the
future.

One spherical panorama of 10000x5000 pixels seems to be about 4MB jpeg-
compressed. So you would need only 12 terabytes of space. Also since you need
60 of these each second, you need storage that can move 240MB/sec, which is
lower than the current speeds of SSDs.

1TB SSD seems to cost about $400, so for only $4800 you would have enough
speedy space to store the panoramas. Enough space to explore whole YC building
with no snapping at all between frames, with complete realism. Actually you
could even do stereo 3D, as you already have the data.

Now it's a different question entirely on how we could take those 3000000
panoramas. Even if you had a Double Robotics bot with a spherical camera
attached to it going around the space, snapping 10 panoramas per second, it
would take 4 days to complete. While that itself is tolerable, how it would
know its position and control its movement to the required accuracy I have no
idea.

Still it blows my mind that storing all that would be possible.

~~~
mixedbit
Such grid would mean that you can move straight only in 8 directions, all
other camera rotations would need to be rounded to these 8 directions. I think
this can result in quite 'jumpy' movement, but maybe human won't be able to
notice such jumps?

~~~
Igglyboo
I would definitely notice a jump like that in a video game, I'm guessing you'd
need over 100 to make it seem smooth.

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mattmanser
I'm not sure copying the controls from google maps is a good thing, I've
always hated them, for me they're incredibly frustrating to use. It could
simply be that I'm so used to FPS controls so they feel too uncanny valley.
But I've had years to get used to them and they still feel awkward.

I appreciate it could just be a personal thing, I've never asked anyone else
what they think, but I seem to regularly accidentally look up because click to
location often competes with viewport manipulation, you then can't get it
'level' which is mildly OCD annoying and the controls also feel backwards as
you have to pull right to go left, pull down to look up, etc. Also the
sensitivity of up/down seems exaggerated to left/right, but probably because
it's windowed, I actually don't know.

I can't describe very well what's wrong, it just generally 'feels' wrong.

Google aren't exactly known for their UIs and as far as I can remember that
control system was their first go at doing it and they've never changed it.

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VMG
So how long until I'll have a .bsp of that (or whatever the kids have these
days) and can fire my rocket launcher at the bus?

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hugs
If you're curious what the camera+tripod setup looks like when it's taking
photos, I found this "selfie" in the 3D model for the Four Seasons Silicon
Valley, Presidential Suite:
[http://i.imgur.com/clHfeC5.png](http://i.imgur.com/clHfeC5.png)

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exit
"view inside" mode feels more like a street view style interpolation of 360°
photos, not a 3d model.

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phkahler
I told a landscape designer it should be possible to walk around a property
with a camera and then automatically build a 3d model. Turns out others are
working on it. Good job. FYI what he does is take measurements and make a 2D
top down drawing and then start sketching concepts for hard-scape ideas around
the building.

Ultimately he'd want a drone to fly around a house and automatically creaete a
3d model and 2d plan. That would probably be exceptionally useful. He's pretty
efficient at doing measurements and drawings, so fully automatic is almost the
only way to be useful to him. Of course that's just one guy but I thought the
example may be helpful.

~~~
jkaunisv1
I tried a Rift last week for the first time and the first thing I thought of
was getting a drone to do a scan of a room. People could use it to set up
their "home space" like in Snow Crash/Gibson's stuff.

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kjell
The Cooper Hewitt (a Smithsonian museum in New York) recently 3d scanned
itself: [http://www.cooperhewitt.org/2014/10/10/3d-scanning-the-
carne...](http://www.cooperhewitt.org/2014/10/10/3d-scanning-the-carnegie-
mansion/)

The model is freely-available (CC0) in FBX ("full geometries and color
textures including interiors") and STL formats.
[http://www.cooperhewitt.org/about/mansionmodel/](http://www.cooperhewitt.org/about/mansionmodel/).

[http://www.3dsystems.com/](http://www.3dsystems.com/) did the
scanning/photography.

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ipsin
I've been interested in the two approaches to mapping out cities and larger
places. Google, for example, has StreetView cars, building a point cloud and
texture map of parts of the world.

In video games like GTA, LA Noire and Watch Dogs real cities are mapped out
using a sort of "conceptual compression" that leaves landmarks but somehow
brings the space closer together. My sense is that this is a labor intensive
process, but what if it could be automated?

It would be interesting way to explore a place, though with the obvious
pitfall that what's not included in the map "doesn't exist".

~~~
drivingmenuts
The process would still be somewhat labor-intensive, since someone would have
to apply significance to the landmarks.

GTA, specifically, doesn't use all the landmarks they find - they instead use
rough facsimiles that give the same impression. It's really rather brilliant -
a different design, but somehow it's familiar if you've been there or seen
that.

Ultimately, for video games, they are still designed by hand, because of the
"if it's not there, it doesn't exist" problem and for a host of other reasons.
Unfortunately, for space reasons, most of it is non-interactive in a
meaningful way.

There's some interesting work being done by ESRI that could hopefully lead to
virtual city designs that are almost fully interactive. Imagine GTA where
every building could be entered and every object could be interacted with
because they are generated on the fly.

Sort of a realistic Minecraft. Very sort of, but still.

~~~
GrantS
I would argue the "significant landmark" problem has essentially been solved
as a side effect of online photo sharing sites (originally Flickr, now
everything) -- the most frequently photographed things are the landmarks, and
the number of photos scales with the significance of the landmark. When you
search for "Rome" on Flickr, the clusters of photos that pop out as being
3D-reconstructable are precisely the landmarks.

See this popular work from 2009, "Building Rome in a Day":
[http://grail.cs.washington.edu/rome/](http://grail.cs.washington.edu/rome/)

Quoting: "The data set consists of 150,000 images from Flickr.com associated
with the tags "Rome" or "Roma". Matching and reconstruction took a total of 21
hours on a cluster with 496 compute cores. Upon matching, the images organized
themselves into a number of groups corresponding to the major landmarks in the
city of Rome. Amongst these clusters can be found the Colosseum, St. Peter's
Basilica, Trevi Fountain and the Pantheon."

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omegote
Google Chrome 38.0.2125.104 on a Xubuntu 12.04 LTS and a modern Nvidia
graphics card... and my "device may not be supported".

I thought we were in the 21st century :/

~~~
haeric
Does WebGL usually work for you? What do you see at
[http://get.webgl.org/](http://get.webgl.org/) ?

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hmb3141
Hi, I downloaded the 3d model you have on your site. It looks really good.
Here's a link to a standalone I made using Unity that allows you to move
around the model (OSX only).

[https://mega.co.nz/#!e9EmiaqK!89u5YTkFFGHFxpCVFNZnE22uetkLBY...](https://mega.co.nz/#!e9EmiaqK!89u5YTkFFGHFxpCVFNZnE22uetkLBYRJwM2bUjGrZc8)

Is this the Highest resolution the model and textures possible on the camera
currently?

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nailer
Got it working: a few questions:

Is this photogrammetry?

If it makes an obj, why can't I move arbitrarily?

How does it compare to AgiSoft Photoscan or 123D catch?

~~~
haeric
You can call it photogrammetry, it uses both 2d imagery and 3d depth data from
depth sensors (think Microsoft Kinect or Google Tango) to make the 3d model.
The viewer limits your movement when you are inside to be able to project
panorama images onto the model, so you get the image quality of 2d images
while you're still in a 3d model. 3d scanning tech just isn't good enough yet
that you would be happy with how it looked up close if you are trying to sell
a house, for instance.

Don't know Photoscan or 123D catch enough to comment spesifically, but in
general many other 3d companies focus on scanning small objects or features,
while we do large buildings/indoor spaces/rooms better (faster/better
quality/cheaper/more convenient) than anyone else I've seen :)

~~~
nailer
Thanks. Photoscan's worth checking out - there's a few people doing large
spaces with drones, as well as the usual object scans you mention. See
[http://www.agisoft.com/community/showcase/](http://www.agisoft.com/community/showcase/)
They've done churches, cliffs, and whole valleys before:
[http://www.theastronauts.com/2014/03/visual-revolution-
vanis...](http://www.theastronauts.com/2014/03/visual-revolution-vanishing-
ethan-carter/)

That said, Photoscan's UI is incredibly poor, and the software has bugs
(particularly around CUDA) so I'd be interested in alternatives.

123D catch (from Autodesk) does cloud based processing like you guys.

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rcarmo
That's amazing, even considering the $4500 for the camera (which will probably
pay for itself in a couple of months if you're a small architecture/design
studio)

I've lost touch with architectural 3D "capture" \- who else is working on this
space? Are there any consumer-level offerings?

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huhtenberg
Looks very cool, but can't get the demo to work at all.

On iPad it said "upgrade to iOS8", on W7/FF33 it said "Oops, something went
wrong", on W8.1/FF33 it went all the way through the loading and then got
stuck with just one pixel in the progress bar left to go. :-|

~~~
haeric
Hey, dev here, thanks for not giving up on the first try :) WebGL is still
pretty new, so it has some quirks.. but you seemed to be particularly unlucky.
Does WebGL usually work on your W7/FF33 setup? (does
[http://get.webgl.org/](http://get.webgl.org/) work?) As for the W8.1/FF33
case, does it work if you try again, or is it still the same?

~~~
huhtenberg
On W8.1 it cycles between "500 Internal server error" (with a blank page, and
not just for the above link, but for the homepage as well) and the stuck case.
When it gets stuck, here's the console from the firebug -

[http://i.imgur.com/lNKLbj5.png](http://i.imgur.com/lNKLbj5.png)

Typekit errors are due to the Referrers being blocked, this is very common and
never disastrous. Disqus and Google Analytics are just blocked at the domain
level.

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tuinslangboogie
Nice modelling. "Y" U NO have computers? This place looks like a wardroom :)

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exit
i can't make sense of the reoccurring subscription plans on the "buy a camera"
page

"3 free models per month"

so the camera by itself (+ whatever software) doesn't just spit out a point
cloud i can do whatever with?

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IanCal
Not relevant to the 3D model, but the text in this article is really difficult
to read for me:

[http://i.imgur.com/ctPgj2v.png](http://i.imgur.com/ctPgj2v.png)

Chrome 38.0.2125.104 on a mac.

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psykovsky
Doesn't work on FF 33.0 Ubuntu x86_64. It just hangs when it's almost finished
with the loading bar.

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andrewchambers
This is really cool technology, I felt like i really was walking into a
building I had never seen before.

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frecar
Nice! I really like how smooth it is to walk around in high resolution images
(3D model)! :)

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imd23
Flawlessly on the iPhone 6 ios8.

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dsugarman
really cool, but tbh I was a little frustrated with the navigation interface.
Was there supposed to be only 2 degrees of freedom? I would love to turn my
head without clicking the mouse.

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adkaplan
Looks like the work of Autodesk ReCap.

[http://www.autodesk.com/products/recap/overview](http://www.autodesk.com/products/recap/overview)

~~~
adkaplan
\--To be clear, I mean it looks like, not is..

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danvoell
Y Combinator's physical space looks a lot different than I remember it too. It
looks like they have expanded.

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hackerews
So cool.

