displaz is a cross platform viewer for displaying lidar point clouds and derived artifacts such as fitted meshes. The interface was originally developed for viewing large airborne laser scans, but also works quite well for point clouds acquired using terrestrial lidar and other sources such as bathymetric sonar.

The goal is to provide a flexible and programmable technical tool for exploring large lidar point data sets and derived geometry.

• Open point clouds up to the size of main memory. Performance remains interactive as the number of points becomes too large to draw in a single frame.
• Create custom point visualizations. The OpenGL shader can be edited interactively. In the shader program, you automatically have access to any per-point attributes defined in the input file. Shader parameters are connected to user-defined GUI controls.
• Plot interactively from your favourite programming language. Displaz IPC lets you script the interface from the command line. Experimental language bindings are available for C++, python, julia and Matlab.

See the user guide for usage examples and instructions.

Binary installer packages for windows are provided on the releases page. For linux, it should be fairly easy to build it yourself by following the instructions below.

The following commands may be used to build displaz on linux:

# Install dependencies (apt-based distributions)
sudo apt-get install git g++ cmake libqt4-dev libqt4-opengl-dev python-docutils

# Install dependencies (yum-based distributions)
sudo yum install git gcc-c++ make patch cmake qt-devel python-docutils

# Install dependencies (OpenSuse distributions)
sudo zypper install git gcc-c++ libqt4-devel glu-devel python-docutils

# Get the source code
git clone https://github.com/c42f/displaz.git
cd displaz

# Build LASlib and ilmbase
mkdir build_external
cd build_external
cmake ../thirdparty/external
make -j4
cd ..

# Build displaz
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make -j4

# Install into CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr/local
sudo make install

To install the dependencies on windows, manually download and install the following tools:

• cmake
• msysgit

For a 64 bit windows compile, you'll need to download the Qt4 source code package since there are no official 64 bit binary packages. For MSVC, configure from the x64 complier command prompt using:

configure -release -no-webkit -nomake demos -nomake examples -opensource -platform win32-msvc2012

The author builds displaz itself from the Visual Studio 2012 Express edition x64 cross tools command prompt using nmake. First, clone the repository using the msysgit command line:

# Get the source code
git clone https://github.com/c42f/displaz.git

Next, in the x64 command prompt:

rem Build LASlib and ilmbase
cd displaz
mkdir build_external
cd build_external
cmake -G "NMake Makefiles" ..\thirdparty\external
nmake
cd ..

rem Build displaz.
rem Assumes that Qt has been installed into C:\Qt\4.8.6
mkdir build
cd build
cmake -G "NMake Makefiles" ^
    -D QT_QMAKE_EXECUTABLE:PATH=C:\Qt\4.8.6\bin\qmake.exe ^
    -D CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX:PATH=dist ^
    ..
nmake

rem Optionally, create the installer package
nmake package

To build displaz, install the following tools:

• cmake >= 2.8
• Python docutils (optional - required to build the html documentation)

Displaz also depends on several libraries. For simplicity, the smaller dependencies are bundled in the thirdparty directory. There's also an automated download/build system for some of the larger ones (LASlib and ilmbase) available at thirdparty/external/CMakeLists.txt. However, you will need to install the following manually:

• Qt >= 4.7 (Note that Qt 5.0 and greater is not supported yet)
• OpenGL >= 3.2
• ilmbase >= 1.0.1 (You don't need to install this if you're using the automated thirdparty build)

Both the LASlib and IlmBase libraries may be built using the separate third party build system in thirdparty/external/CMakeLists.txt.

To read the .las and .laz file formats, you'll need one of the following:

• LASlib >= something-recent (known to work with 150406). This is the default because it's reasonably fast and has no additional library dependencies.
• PDAL >= something-recent (known to work with 0.1.0-3668-gff73c08). You may select PDAL by setting the build option DISPLAZ_USE_PDAL=TRUE. Note that building PDAL also requires several libraries including boost, laszip and GDAL.

If you only want to read ply files (for example, to use the scripting language bindings), and don't care about las you may set the build option DISPLAZ_USE_LAS=FALSE.

displaz is regularly compiled on linux and windows. It has also been compiled on OSX but doesn't yet work properly on all versions. displaz is known to work well with recent NVidia and ATI graphics cards and drivers. Some issues have been observed with intel integrated graphics and older ATI drivers.

Behind the scenes displaz uses code written by many people. The following third party projects are gratefully acknowledged:

• Qt - http://qt-project.org
• LASLib - http://www.cs.unc.edu/~isenburg/lastools
• PDAL - http://www.pdal.io
• ilmbase - http://www.openexr.com
• rply - http://www.impa.br/~diego/software/rply
• GLEW - http://glew.sourceforge.net/
• Small pieces from OpenImageIO - http://openimageio.org