whycoding126 / point_cloud_viewer

View billions of points in your browser

Point viewer

This is a standalone project to make viewing massive point clouds easy and convenient. It was build to serve the needs of the Cartographer project, but is useful in its own right.

Building

Client

1. Change into the client directory: cd client.
2. Install npm. We strongly suggest using nvm.
3. Install javascript dependencies: npm install.
4. Build the client: npm run build.

Server

1. Install Rust: curl https://sh.rustup.rs -sSf | sh. See http://rustup.rs for details.
2. cargo build --release. The binaries will end up in target/release/. The server binaries includes the client files, so the server is stand alone.

If you want to develop and change the .proto files you will also need to install the code generation from rust-protobuf. For now, the generated rust code is checked in and needs to be regenerated manually.

Usage

First, build an octree using build_octree from a point source like a PLY or XYZ file. Then serve it up using viewer - this requires that the client files have been build and are found.

Prior art

This work was inspired through the following projects. This project focus is on ease of deployment and speed.

• Potree
• Megatree