plasio is a project by Uday Verma and Howard Butler that implements point cloud rendering capability in a browser. Specifically, it provides a functional implementation of the ASPRS LAS format, and it can consume LASzip-compressed data using LASzip NaCl module. Plasio is Chrome-only at this time, but it is hoped that other contributors can step forward to bring it to other browsers.

It is expected that most WebGL-capable browers should be able to support plasio, and it contains nothing that is explicitly Chrome-specific beyond the optional NaCL LASzip module. We just haven't tested it beyond Mac and Windows Chrome Canary at this time.

https://plas.io contains a demo of the interface and supports both LAS and LAZ.

What does the name plasio mean?

Nothing.

What are future plans for the software?

We hope that plasio provides a significant enough capability that others start to contribute exploitation and visualization flourishes.

When will it support X, Y, or Z?

The software is its formative stages at this point, and pull requests that provide new capabilities or fix signficant issues are going to be the most persuasive way to impact its future development.

Plasio uses the Gulp build system:

npm install -g gulp

To setup the development environment, you can run:

npm install

This will download all dependencies required to setup the build system.

You can then build and stage files under the build directory by running:

gulp

While developing, you may run:

gulp develop

This will serve built files locally and open your default browser pointing to the index page. Any changes you make to source files will fire gulp tasks that will keep the build directory up to date. The build system also uses gulp's live-reload plugin, which works great with Google Chrome's Live Reload extension.

The gulp file includes a task to publish directly to plas.io, however, you need AWS Access for that to work. You may direct plasio to your own AWS buckets, in which case you will have to edit gulpfile.js to direct it likewise.

The publish task looks for ~/.aws.json which should include two fields, key and secret.

To publish to AWS simply run:

gulp publish

• Blue Marker Icon from Function Icons By Liam McKay
• High precision GPU point picking wouldn't have been possible without the Work done here.
• Carlos Scheidegger for GPU float to bytes conversion.

The software is licensed under the permissive MIT license.