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I am attempting to use iTowns2 (https://github.com/iTowns/itowns2) to visualize point cloud data in the browser. According to the README: "[iTowns'] first purpose was the visualisation of street view images and terrestrial lidar point cloud."

From this I glean that there should be instances of people using iTowns to visualize point cloud data somewhere online. I've been looking for days and I can't find an example of someone using iTowns2 to visualize point cloud data in the browser.

The example in the GH repo renders a globe in the browser but no point cloud. There is a iTowns/iTowns2-sample-data repo which has a bunch of point cloud data but no instructions on how to use the data or references to other resources.

Has anyone used this package to show point cloud data in the browser? Does anyone know an article or resource that demonstrates doing this with iTowns2? Does anyone know of a different library for rendering point cloud data with examples and/or better documentation?

Ideally I would be able to track down the source code for something like this: http://www.itowns-project.org/#demo

currenthandle
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2 Answers2

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The documentation is quite ambiguous, and judgind by the Github issues it looks like the library is under heavy refactoring.

I took a quick look to this repo and realized that it is just using Potree for point cloud visualization:

http://potree.org/

So you can just use Potree directly. Wich is better documented.

In addition to this, it's quite trivial to set up your own point cloud visualizer using Three.js.

Just take a look at the Points object:

https://threejs.org/docs/#api/objects/Points

And this example:

https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/blob/master/examples/webgl_buffergeometry_points.html

Three.js also includes some 3D format loaders, like ply:

https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/blob/master/examples/webgl_loader_ply.html

If you are interested in using las files you might also want to look at:

https://github.com/verma/plasio

Community
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David de la Iglesia
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Let's provide a early 2018 update! (source: I'm a maintainer)

iTowns now supports visualizing pointclouds directly. You can test it here: http://www.itowns-project.org/itowns/examples/pointcloud.html

If you want to test your own data, please visit http://www.itowns-project.org/itowns/examples/pointcloud.html?selector=1

We currently support results from PotreeConverter, and lopocs. We plan to add 3dtiles pointcloud format soon.

We indeed used potree for pointclouds before, but that was not ideal, a bit because we diverge on some technology/design choices, but mainly because using potree prevented us to tightly integrate pointcloud visualization in iTowns. For instance, iTowns stops its rendering loop when it has nothing to do (saves a lot of cpu), and potree does not. It also allows us to implement our own culling/SSE/network priority... heuristics.

Potree has currently better graphic post-treatments of pointclouds, although we also plan to add EDL and other improvements (occlusions for instance) soon. And of course, the advantage of iTowns is that it's not limited to pointclouds, but can display a variety of data type, from rasters to vectors, see the examples page and especially this example of a pointcloud on a globe.

But the main difference between these 2 projects is that Potree aims at being a standalone viewer (AFAIK), whereas iTowns is more a framework to implement your own app! Potree remains a big source of inspiration for us concerning pointclouds, big kudos to their maintainer :-)

(Btw, the github has moved to https://github.com/iTowns/itowns)

autra
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  • I don't have enough rep on SO to create the "itowns" tag, but as soon as we have one, I'm going to monitor it. – autra Feb 24 '18 at 12:55