Tuesday, January 18, 2022

A 3D Tour of Clarion Alley

The Clarion Alley Mural Project is an artists' collective which was created to transform Clarion Alley in the Mission District into a graffiti and mural canvas. You can observe the success of the project on the Clarion Alley 3D Tour.

The Clarion Alley Tour is an experimental 3D tour of the street murals in Clarion Alley in San Francisco made by Kieran Farr of the 3DStreet team.As you scroll through the Clarion Alley Tour you are taken on an impressive 3D journey along Clarion Alley. While you progress through the tour you can view the actual street murals in context, almost as if you were in the Alley yourself. 

I've been writing a lot recently about the growing trend of interactive 3D models in data journalism. These 3D immersive tours usually require a small team of programmers and a lot of work hours. The 3DStreet team's Clarion Alley Tour is a demo tour which shows how an immersive tour can be created using a number of existing JavaScript libraries. The tour was created using the Polycam LiDAR 3D scanner (for capturing the imagery), A-frame, the New York Times R&D's 3D tiles component, and the Cesium mapping platform. 

At the moment the Clarion Alley Tour is desktop only and won't work on mobile devices. You can clone the project and take a closer look at the code behind the Clarion Alley Tour on its Glitch site. 

Here are links to some other great examples of immersive 3D tours:

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