Publishing point clouds online

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jochenstier
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Publishing point clouds online

Post by jochenstier »

A few weeks ago I asked this community about useful features in an online publishing tool for point clouds. Much of that feedback has driven the recent development effort at Voxxlr. I would now like to present some results and hopefully start another discussion:

In addition to account infrastructure, interactive 3D viewing etc. Voxxlr now also provides the following capabilities:

1) Measurement of distances, angles and elevation. The measurements are displayed as a 2D vector graphics overlay rather than 3D widgets embedded in the scene. While this approach has its pros and cons, it certainly allows for a rich graphical display.

2) Insert various media at specific 3D locations including video, images, external links and formatted text.

3) Predefine viewpoints for easy navigation. This area will still be improved to provide more intuitive point and click walkthroughs.

Conceptually, Voxxlr treats a point cloud as a document for which there exists an editor and a viewer. The following link contains a point cloud of a quarry as presented in the viewer (Chrome and FireFox work best):

http://tiny.cc/25r3jy
quarry.png
There are various active areas you can click on to open annotations, move measurements etc. The following time laps video illustrates how this presentation was created using the web interface at http://www.voxxlr.com:

https://youtu.be/XHTu18zsJx0

Another development cycle is now starting and I would like to again invite feedback and suggestions on features that are useful in sharing point clouds online. The following areas have so far been identified as candidates for the next release:

1) Several people mentioned the ability to integrate information form external sources such as Asset Management Databases. I would like to better understand the nature of the these databases. Are there industry standards and web based APIs to retrieve that data? I assume that accessing external data sources will be more complex than actually displaying the information retrieved.

2) There have also been request to import 3D models into a scan. I assume this would be useful in communicating proposed changes to a site. Although not yet public, there is already an importer for Collada files (.dae). Is that a suitable format? What about Sketchfab files?

Please don't hesitate to suggest additional feature. At this point we are also looking for participants in pilot projects. As Voxxlr is still in beta, there is no charge and special care is taken to address the needs of individual participants.
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max72
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Re: Publishing point clouds online

Post by max72 »

I uploaded a test scan, intensity only.
I cannot switch between RGB (useless in my case) and Intensity.
Is it a feature you foresee?
In case with intensity there are many options (ramp for instance) and another useful feature is coloring by altitude.

Thanks for the effort,
Massimo
ing. Massimo De Marchi - +39 347 32 17 049 - www.studiodemarchi.net
jochenstier
I have made 20-30 posts
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Posts: 20
Joined: Wed Nov 02, 2016 5:37 pm
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Full Name: Jochen Stier
Company Details: Geist Software Labs
Company Position Title: Founder
Country: Canada
Skype Name: jochen.stier
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Location: Ottawa, Canada
Contact:

Re: Publishing point clouds online

Post by jochenstier »

There will be a release later this week or early next week that contains different rendering functions including classification, intensity and height. Most of this will happen as different "shaders" running on the GPU. Once that infrastructure is in place, the library of visualization functions will grow over time. There is a lot that can be done to enhance the visual quality of a point cloud using shaders, but some functions will require a good graphics card.

I will let you know once the new release is out

Jochen
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