As a 24/7 working broadcast facility, Sutro Tower has remained off-limits to public visitation since it was christened in 1973. In 2024, the tower, in partnership with the City of San Francisco, asked Stimulant to chronicle, capture, and tell its complete story to honor its 50th anniversary and satisfy the curiosity of local residents and tower fans worldwide.
Navigate strict facility requirements, challenging heights, and naturally uncooperative weather conditions to capture an incredibly complex and detailed structure in eye-popping detail, while condensing a complicated and multi-threaded 50-year history into a compelling narrative.
Explore Sutro Tower takes visitors on a virtual tour over, around, and through the facility, lets them travel to the very top of the tower to take in jaw-dropping interactive panoramas and traverse 1300-foot high catwalks that connect the tower’s three legs, gives a history lesson with "Above the Fog" — a short documentary video — and shares 50 years of historical photos.
Sutro Tower, San Francisco’s most visible landmark and an unpretentious underground icon, has long been a subject of conversation and controversy. As a 24/7 working broadcast facility, it has remained off-limits to public visitation since it was christened in 1973. In 2024, the tower, in partnership with the City of San Francisco, asked Stimulant to chronicle, capture, and tell its story to honor its 50th anniversary and satisfy the curiosity of local residents and tower fans worldwide. Explore Sutro Tower is the product of that collaboration, the first publicly-accessible means of touring the facility.
A custom 3D printed model represents the key areas and systems of the fab, but much like in real life, the interesting stories are hidden behind the facades.
Sutro Tower is both a 50-year old structure and a state-of-the-art broadcast facility. Its unique shape is visible from any point in San Francisco (foggy days notwithstanding), but getting up close has never been possible. Our goal was to create the next best thing to a physical tour, with the added benefit of being able to fly around as if on a magic carpet, so we set out to create an ultra-high-resolution digital twin that would capture every detail of the tower. This entailed nearly a year of complex planning, scheduling, and negotiating broadcast and weather limitations. In the end, over 14,000 drone photographs and a full LIDAR scan were captured from every elevation and angle.
Once captured, the photos were processed, aligned, and digitally reconstructed using a machine learning technique known as "Gaussian Splatting" — a way to make a 3D scene by using blurry dots that combine together to form smooth, realistic images. This provided us with a photorealistic digital twin that could be navigated in ways that neither drone nor human could achieve. The result is cinematic and breathtaking.
A specially-engineered sliding rail system and 9:32 aspect ratio displays in a custom enclosure allow visitors to explore the entirety of the model as if they were holding a tablet, without the issues associated with tablets in public spaces.
A comprehensive documentary, “Above the Fog,” tells the story of Mt. Sutro and the creation of the tower, from the time of indigenous people to modern day, along with the stories of those who love it or loathe it. Some residents cherish the tower, adorning themselves with artwork and tattoos, while others feel it is an eyesore and an imposition. Opinions aside, the tower was instrumental in ushering in a new era of television and broadcast media to the Bay Area. Our documentary set out to capture a rounded perspective, hosted by a local news anchor.
Sutro Tower was sitting on a veritable mountain of archival photos (located atop the mountain upon which Sutro Tower itself sits). We scanned and organized the photos, creating a custom image gallery that provides never-before seen views of construction and SF in the seventies and eighties. Photos are free to download for creative purposes.
Special guests can take the tour in mixed reality via Microsoft Hololens 2. Up to eight visitors can explore the fab model at the same time.
To support discussions with larger groups of customers, executives and visiting dignitaries, we also developed a mixed reality version of the tour that runs on Microsoft Hololens 2. With this, up to 8 people can simultaneously explore the fab from 360 degrees around the exhibit. Vignette navigation and narration are unique to each user, so they can explore at their own pace. A menu floating in mixed reality space lets guests select different vignettes by either pressing virtual buttons with their fingers, or navigating with voice commands. Closed captioning is available for narration as well.
The Intel Mixed Reality Fab Tour is a next-generation virtual facility tour designed specifically to present highly complex and difficult-to-grasp concepts in a straightforward, compelling, and tech-forward way. It leverages both augmented and mixed reality devices to deliver high-resolution 3D animated content to the general public as well as VIP guests.
A companion website makes the educational content available worldwide. With this exhibit, Intel now has a powerful tool to tell their unique story as not only the most capable chip fabrication company in the world, but also the company that started the microprocessor revolution back in 1968.
