XB PointStream

Releases

A cross-browser JavaScript tool which will emulate Arius3D's PointStream viewer. It will be able to quickly render a large amount of point cloud data to the <canvas> tag using WebGL.
XBPS 0.1
XBPS 0.2
XBPS 0.3
XBPS 0.4
XBPS 0.4.5 [Only Lib | Full]

XB PointStream Dev Links

3D Image Gallery
Blogs
Specifications
LightHouse
Github
Twitter
YouTube Videos

Development Resources

GPU Gems
GPU Gems 2

WebGL Specification
WebGL Cheat Sheet
OpenGLES 2.0 man pages

Occlusion Culling Algorithms

Parser Interface

/*
  Add an event listener to the parser. Once the event occurs, the parser
  will call the associated function and pass in a reference to itself.
 
  The parser needs to pass itself back to the library since the library could
  be working with many parsers simultaneously.

  @param {String} eventName - can be one of the following:
  "onstart" - must occur exactly once       - func(parser)
  "onparse" - must occur one or many times  - func(parser, {"VERTEX":[...], "COLOR":[...], etc...}
  "onfinish" - must occur exactly once      - func(parser)
  "hook" - ?

  @param {Function} func - the function to call when the event occurs.
*/
addEventListener(eventName, func)

/*
  Begins to load the resource

  @param {String} path - path to resource
*/
load(path)

/*
  Get the version of this parser.
 
  @returns {String} parser version
*/
getVersion()

/*
  Get the number of points which have been parsed.

  @returns {Number} the number of points parsed so far by the parser.
*/
getNumParsedPoints()

/*
  Get the total number of points in the point cloud, including points
  which have not yet been parsed.

  @returns {Number} the total number of points in the resource or -1 if unknown.
*/
getNumTotalPoints()

/*
  Get the progress of the parser, how much it has parsed so far.

  @returns {Number} value from 0 to 1 or -1 if unknown.
*/
getProgress()

/*
  The size of the resource in bytes.

  @returns {Number} the number of bytes in the resource or -1 if unknown.
*/
getFileSize()

/*  This example only demonstrates syntax. It hasn't been tested.
*/

function startCallback(parser){
  alert( "Using parser version: " + parser.getVersion();
}

function parseCallback(parser){
  parser.getProgress();
  parser.getNumParsedPoints();
  parser.getFileSize();
  parser.getNumTotalPoints();
}

function finishCallback(){
}

var parser = new ASCParser();
parser.addEventListener("onstart", startCallback);
parser.addEventListener("onparse", parseCallback);
parser.addEventListener("onfinish", finishCallback);

parser.load(somePath);

Performance Issue Ideas

• Spatially partition point cloud into Bounding volume hierarchy and do bounding volume frustum culling
• Do static rendering
• Render low LOD when rotating point cloud
• Push as much as we can to CPU and GPU
• Use progressive "mesh" optimization to render objects if they are far from the camera
• Allow user to control LOD
• Stream point cloud, dynamically create and merge bounding volumes
• Pre-create Bounding volume hierarchy