Sutro Tower 50th Anniversary Virtual Tour

For Sutro Tower’s 50th anniversary, Gavin led the gigapixel, LIDAR, and photogrammetric capture that became explore.sutrotower.com — a full 3D reconstruction of the 1,811-foot San Francisco landmark, built with Stimulant. The tower is normally inaccessible to the public; the project brought it to a browser.

Roundshot’s own 13 March 2025 press release names the team directly: Gavin D. Farrell, Michael Franz, and Julio Perez, working with the Roundshot VR Drive capture system — independent, third-party confirmation of the team behind the work. Coverage followed from ABC7/KGO, SFist, Mission Local, Radio World, TV Tech, and Hacker News.

The capture totals 46 gigapixels across roughly 1,300 source images — the tower’s scale rendered down to a browser-explorable model, the kind of project that only exists because someone was willing to climb 1,811 feet with a camera rig and figure out how to stitch what came back.