Free Web-hosted Pointcloud Viewer

[Rigour_Wes]

Hi, Everyone,

A client has recently shown me a product they have received from another survey company asking if we can replicate this. It was a web hosted viewer of the panoramic images from a laser scanner (type unknown). It allowed users to move around just like Truview just without any functionality, it was just a viewing platform.

The only slightly identifying feature was that within the web page address was the extension vr-360-tour.com . I have tried to google this but cannot find anything which remotely looks or sounds like the same product.

The viewer also allowed for the company to include their own logo and company information to be visible.

I'm interested in this for a number of reasons:
the other survey company are not charging for this service, so I assume there is an element of low or no cost involved
clients don't want to handle bulky lgs files - even with the pointcloud removed they would prefer not to have the file as large as it ends up
having the pointcloud viewer supplied as a link to the client is a lot easier than clients handling and storing larger lgs files
a lot of my clients only need to be able to view the pointcloud to help contextualise the deliverables so all the functionality within Truview is wasted.

If anyone can point me in the right direction I would really appreciate it.

Wes

[Leandre Robitaille]

Free is impossible, there is always a underlying cost, but it could be a self hosted with your own server using a potree type of viewer.
A solution like this, that would allow you to have a potree type of pointcloud and 360 pano is Vision Lidar from Geoplus. It requires you to have your own server and the best internet connection you can get since you would be "streaming" the rendering from your server to your clients. This also means you need a very good CPU server with lots of ssd cache and those powerhorse servers are expensive. The vision lidar license is a one time lifetime purchase and if I am not wrong it is 25-35k$. You can have your own website domaine for this just like what your client showed you.

Issue with hosting this yourself on your own server is that it requires a lot of bandwith and often you are limited by your local internet provider. This is when you might want to look into a AWS or Azure type of hosting. This would allow you to take advantage of the stability and speed of a web hosting service. Most current pointcloud web hosted service do this, as it is easily scalable and stable (cintoo, webshare, etc)

There are many other solutions but the visionlidar one is the on that pops in my mind. But as stated, unless you develop your own solution, nothing is free.

As for not charging the clients, we used to do this to our webshare from the 5.5 scene, when adobeflash was still alive. We would host the viewer on our own servers using our own website. You could only view the 360 pano, no pointcloud. We did charge a 1 time fee of 300$, we would dilude that in our quotes. But we wouldn't rebill every year.

Now we use Cintoo and it is much more powerfull than what our old webshare was.

A "free"service could be the autodesk recap web viewer, but it depends on your A360 deal with them. For a larger engineering company it could be free'ish

[MarkJLane]

It might be something they deployed themselves in-house. I used to do the same for my previous employer when customers wanted web-hosted panoramic images - https://discob0-b3e5f.web.app/

If you know your way around Aframe or Threejs, putting something like this together manually is pretty straight forward.

[Phil Marsh]

Hi, Everyone,

A client has recently shown me a product they have received from another survey company asking if we can replicate this. It was a web hosted viewer of the panoramic images from a laser scanner (type unknown). It allowed users to move around just like Truview just without any functionality, it was just a viewing platform.

The viewer also allowed for the company to include their own logo and company information to be visible.

If anyone can point me in the right direction I would really appreciate it.

Hi wes,

This is just a 360 pano tour that can easily be created and hosted here - https://vr360.tours/tools/lp/Bo/vrre

These are great but you won't get the 3D spatial data behind the imagery e.g. being able to click on the pixels to create any dims as the image has no depth. You can't also have your customers create asset/geo tags on the data and you can't link these to FM/EM databases without a lot of manual work. Great for viewing though if you have the time to create this and host online.

[MaZschi]

Hi Wes,

You can give FARO Sphere a try. The base model is free of charge while limited to 20GB. But maybe sufficient for you for a smaller project.
https://www.farosphere.com