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I have a serious question. Should this be a web visualization? Doesn't all the abstraction lead to performance hits? Tons of data needs to be pulled off the hard drive, network, RAM and shoved into the graphics card. Is putting a web browser in the middle of that pipeline the most efficient use of resources? I feel like it is a hammer situation.

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WebGL may be good enough if you are producing low-res visualizations/interfaces and using the rest of the CPU/GPU to crunch the simulation.

Epic got the Unreal Engine running in-browser with WebGL and asm.js. The stuff Uber is doing isn't anywhere near as graphically intensive as that.

disclaimer: I work at Uber, but not on this project. Also, I used to work on game engines, which have a lot in common with these types of simulators.

Think of the end application: internal tooling. Is it "good enough"?

I am thinking about the end application. All the more reason to ignore all of the benefits of a web solution and spin the highest performance version. Because performance is critical when viewing tons of cameras and lidar with near-realtime playback.

Save and replay is how this data is usually used. Run headless in real time and fancy complex gui upon replay.

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