Lidar point cloud visualization with WebGL

Here are some demos using recent WebGL capabilities available in modern browsers to visualize lidar point cloud data. These proof-of-concept demos make use of some bleeding-edge open source tools that are still in development stages, primarily the osgjs javascript library. The point clouds were obtained with a Riegl terrestrial lidar scanner around Santa Barbara, CA.

• Parma Park (6 million points, 140 Mb)
• UCSB Campus (11 million points, 260 Mb)
• Alameda Park (13 million points, 290 Mb)

Nota bene: For these demos to work you will need a very up-to-date browser and a recent computer with good hardware-accelerated graphics capabilities. The demos will take several minutes to load since hundreds of megabytes are downloaded before any rendering begins. If the demo does not get past the loading stage after several minutes, it may have failed to load. Try using a different browser or better computer.

For my setup, this is what works: On Windows using Firefox is best; Chrome seems to crash on all but the Parma Park demo. However, the Alameda Park demo seems to be too large for Firefox, so Windows users may not be able to load that one at all. On Ubuntu Linux, Chrome loads all of the demos fine, while Firefox loads all but the Alameda Park demo.