Pointscene.com: Explore Real World 3D Scenes from Lidar Data | Hacker News Reader

Pointscene.com: Explore Real World 3D Scenes from Lidar Data

pointscene.com

61 pointsanttiviljami9 comments

Maybe I'm just a grumpy old man, but I really dislike this style of website that requires you to poke around for ages trying to figure out what it's about, or what value it would bring me to use it.

Examples:

+ The title of this HN post promises it uses Lidar data, but one of the three examples I looked at had nothing to do with Lidar, and the other two didn't mention Lidar at all.

+ That first example shows a drone-based measurement system, but it wasn't clear the measurements were done by the website, as opposed to the data's originator.

+ The second example I looked at purports to show a volumetric analysis of a concrete plant, but it has no description, and I don't see any actual analysis taking place. On the other hand, my laptop slows to a crawl whenever I'm on that page, so it must be doing something. The comments on that page did promise that I can "activate" a map, but gave no indication what that means, or why I should want to do so.

+ The "upload" page states that in three steps I can start measuring my data, but it doesn't give me any reason I should upload my data to somebody else's website, rather than just take measurements myself. What's superior about the website's tools? What formats are supported? No indication, and apparently no way to find out unless I sign up and start trying to upload data.

+ The "plans" page implies, without making explicit, that if I upload with a free account, I will automatically share my data with others, but not be able to measure it, nor be able to download somebody else's data. So let's say I get a free account. What can I do with my data? Conversely, let's say I pay for an account. What measurements can I make? How do I discover what data are available for me to download? And what indications do I have of the quality of the data (e.g., what's the spatial resolution, what are the errors in the measurements, and have the data been vetted in any way to ensure there were no processing errors)?

So where's the value?

Note I'm not saying there's no value here. Maybe there is. But the website doesn't do anything to make its value proposition clear -- unless I'm willing to poke around through enough of their examples, and the examples I looked at didn't show me anything useful.

I have no affiliation with Pointscene but to me it was rather simple. You can upload your 3D point cloud data and share it with others to view. I figured this out within a few seconds of looking at the site.

Lidar comes in because that is a common method to capture this data.

With a higher level account you can measure, download, and have private data. I'm not sure how useful that would be, but that's the value proposition.

Thank you for your insight as well! If interested in further testing you can reach me at jonne @ pointscene.com

Hi,

As the CTO of Pointscene I would like to thank you so much for the time spent evaluating and writing your comments. We appreciate all the feedback we get very highly.

With Pointscene we are helping our users provide better service for their customers. For example we see a lot of new businesses providing drone data generated with commercial s/w e.g. Pix4D, Agisoft and Open Source projects e.g. OpenDroneMap [1]. Also a lot of terrestrial and airborne LiDAR data is finding it's way to new markets as no desktop s/w is required for the users.

We have a section for the supported formats and are adding more along the way [2].

As a way to show our thanks for your time I'd like to set you up with a full account. If interested - could you send me an email to jonne at pointscene.com ?

[1] https://github.com/OpenDroneMap/OpenDroneMap/ [2] https://pointscene.com/features-and-formats/

Out of interest, I assume most of these are then mapped back to planar geometry for rendering. Does anyone have any links for the math / current frameworks for this?

Potree renders pointclouds realtime just fine: www.potree.org.

No papers as such, it uses a fairly straightforward scheme of octree based sparse representation.

It's pure pointcloud rendering. See https://github.com/potree/potree

The Netherlands made available all the LIDAR points in the whole country and offered a point-cloud viewer of the data on [1]. The resolution is quite good, so you might want to have a look.

[1] http://www.ahn.nl/pagina/apps-en-tools/3d-pointcloud-viewer....

The UK has too from the Environment Agency, largely undertaken for flooding studies, (apologies for the longform URL):

https://data.gov.uk/data/map-preview?url=http%3A%2F%2Fenviro...

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