00 · The view
9.2km²
of San Francisco, laser-scanned and rebuilt
This is the window at golden hour. Nothing out there is a photograph: it is a model of the real city, made from public data and rendered in Blender. Here it is, taken apart.
The area the 2023 USGS lidar was read for: the view from the window, out to 3.6 km
01 · Raw shapes
11,593
buildings, as plain grey clay
The ground and every building, from OpenStreetMap's footprints, raised to the heights the laser scan measured. No detail, no colour, no air. Of the trees, only the park's planting below the window, so its beds and paths read.
Footprints © OpenStreetMap contributors; heights from the 2023 USGS lidar
02 · The detail
19,564
real windows, cut into the near walls
Within 360 m of the window the walls get openings, sills and blinds; the roofs get vents and hatches out to 1.6 km.
On the site since 18 October (the first build had 20,043 windows; a fix for the night re-fitted the storeys)
03 · X-ray
2.97billion
triangles in the golden scene, every copy counted
Every surface coloured by what it is, with its triangles' edges drawn in. Blue: the plain buildings. Grey: the new detail. Tan: the scanned ground. Red-brown: the courts' deck. The trees come out dark: their edges are that dense.
Counted inside Blender, in the golden-hour scene
04 · Trees
107,737
trees, each where a real one stands
Positions from the 2023 laser scan and the city's street tree list. The 2,807 nearest use 16 detailed models.
Positions from the 2023 USGS lidar and DataSF's Street Tree List
05 · Materials
59
materials on the city
Colour and texture for walls, roofs, streets, water and trees, before the air goes in. Most of it is made by code, not photographs. The street life arrives here too.
Counted in the scene itself
06 · Light
14
moments of one day, each rendered on its own
Golden hour, 18:56: the sun 10° up, the sky, the haze over the bay and the clouds. The site shows the moment nearest the real sun in San Francisco.
Day of the renders: 23 August 2026, predawn 05:49 to night 22:30
07 · Night
54%
of flats with a light on at 22:30
Plus street lamps, harbour lights and the bridge. The share follows the hour, from residential lighting data. An extra layer can light more windows.
The extra layer: 19,816 more lit panes at night
08 · What moves
15.1
big ships a day across the Golden Gate
The view runs on real timetables: ships, the Sausalito ferry, tour boats, sailboats, bridge traffic and planes. Every visitor sees the same ship at the same second.
San Francisco Bar Pilots, 2024: 5,529 crossings · the Port of San Francisco's 2026 cruise calendar · Golden Gate Ferry's timetable · Caltrans PeMS
09 · Sound
0
recordings
Every sound is made in the browser, from the same clock as the view: four foghorns with their Coast Guard patterns, the cable car's bell, gulls, and a felt piano in five moods set by the sun.
The rings: the foghorns' real rhythms, in step with UTC, drawn where they stand
Scale
The same dot for everything, so the numbers can be compared by eye.
On the shelf
54
books
The short line at the top left.
Photographs
1,182
photograph files
What the site can show before the 3D loads: 14 moments, every view, every screen size, two formats.
Zoom
9,016
4x zoom tiles
644 one-degree squares of the city, at each of the 14 moments.
The city
11,593
buildings
Up close
19,564
windows with sills and blinds
Trees
107,737
trees
Every dot on the screen.
Where they stand
107,737
trees, at their real positions
The same dots, moved to where each tree is. The dense dark patch is the Presidio; the city's grid shows in its street trees.
109,680 in the merged list; the scene plants 107,737 (the rest stand on water or roofs)
Up close
Three instruments. Drag them.
Three renders from the same spot (40, 64 and 160 mm lenses), laid exactly on top of each other. Scrub toward the block with the fire escape.
1.0x
The same render at 1.6x, the camera untouched. Left: the live city until 18 October. Right: with the new detail.
BeforeWith the detail
The live site at 22:00, looking down from the window. The base lights 54 % of flats; the dial adds the extra window layer on top, as the site does by the hour.
Dial 0.00
The day
The photographs the homepage opens on. The page's own colours follow the moment, as the site's do.
The data
Laid on top of each other, as the build reads them. The desk is the warm dot; the pale wedge is what the window sees.
1 · The ground
1,406,920
quads of terrain, and the bay floor
Elevation from 205 open terrain tiles (AWS Open Data). Near the window the ground is the laser scan's own: 463,540 triangles.
Terrain Tiles on AWS Open Data, from USGS and NOAA elevation data
2 · The laser scan
747M
laser points, streamed and gridded
USGS lidar flown on 20 April 2023: about 78 returns per square metre, 91 near the window. It gives every roof its height and finds the trees.
The USGS 3D Elevation Program's 2023 San Francisco survey, gridded at 0.5 m, and 0.25 m near the window
3 · From above
25cm
per pixel, NOAA aerial photo
Flown in August 2022 and aligned to the scan; used to check it. The ground's colour comes from a NAIP aerial image.
NOAA Office for Coastal Management, 2022 orthoimagery (CC0)
4 · Footprints
17,536
building outlines, OpenStreetMap
Fetched on 14 October. 11,593 of them become buildings; the rest sit behind the room, out of sight.
© OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL)
5 · Trees
109,680
trees in the merged list
39,559 found in the scan, the rest from the older list outside it. Their kinds come from DataSF's Street Tree List (45,125 rows).
DataSF's Street Tree List (public domain), merged with the trees the lidar found
Together
5
sources, all public
Elevation, laser scan, aerial photo, footprints and trees, in one frame: renderer metres, the desk at zero.
The bay
The routes the living layer uses, and the navigation lights blinking with their real characters.
27
navigation lights, each with its own rhythm
From the Coast Guard's Light List: Point Bonita occults every 4 s, the bridge's south pier flashes red every 15 s, Point Diablo is isophase 6 s.
What the view and the sound did that day, from the tables in the site's code. Ships are drawn per 20-minute slot: about one slot in five carries one.
The Port of San Francisco's calendar, every call; one square per day.
The room
The objects are the site's pages: the shelf is the books, the print the quotes, the notebook the essays.
54
books on the shelf
19
quotes
11
essays, on two leaves
66,798
triangles in the live 3D room
The page opens on a photograph rendered in Blender. When the browser has built the room in 3D, it takes over at the photograph's own camera. The aim: no visible jump. Drag across a picture: the photograph is on the left, the live 3D on the right.
PhotographLive 3D
PhotographLive 3D
PhotographLive 3D
PhotographLive 3DSound
Off until you turn it on. Then the browser synthesizes the room and the city from the same clock as the view: two visitors hear the same foghorn at the same second.
Their real patterns from the Coast Guard's Light List, phased to UTC. On the site they sound when there is fog.
The build
The first commit was on 13 October at 22:06: "a desk on Russian Hill looking at the Golden Gate". Two Claude accounts have worked on it since, a coordinator and a worker with its helpers, under one rulebook.
662
commits, all branches
64
work branches
41
written briefs for helpers
8
deploys, since 17 Oct
When a job was too big for the Mac, Claude rented graphics cards in the cloud: it started a machine, sent it the scene, rendered, brought the pictures home and shut the machine down again.
Eight machines over four days, 15 to 18 October, here and there: an hour or two at a time, mornings, afternoons and evenings, once past midnight.
In all, 9 hours 15 minutes of rendering, about 22 GPU-hours, for 661 renders, on up to four RTX 4090s at once.
The longest run: 220 renders in two hours on two RTX 5090s. The last: the city at night, 49 renders in 48 minutes on four RTX 4090s.
Everything else ran on the Mac on the desk, one Blender or one test browser at a time, taking turns: since the morning of 18 October, 203 turns, about 26 hours.
The 4x zoom has been on the site since 19 October.
Along the way
The comparisons the work was judged on. Tap one to see it full size.
