Tiny Online Tools
A viewer that understands point clouds
Most online 3D viewers will technically open a LAS file and render it as a uniform grey haze. That is not viewing a point cloud, it is confirming one exists. The things that make a cloud readable are all point-cloud-specific, and this viewer is built around them.
Colour by what you actually need to see
- RGB — the colour captured alongside the geometry, when the file carries it. Photogrammetry output usually does; bare LiDAR usually does not.
- Intensity — the strength of the returned laser pulse, mapped to greyscale. Reveals material differences that RGB misses entirely: wet asphalt against dry, metal roofing against tile.
- Classification — the ASPRS class codes stored per point. Ground, low/medium/high vegetation, building, water, rail, road surface, wires, towers and bridge decks each get their own colour and a legend with point counts. This is the mode that makes a survey legible in one glance.
- Elevation — Z mapped through a perceptual gradient. The default choice for terrain, and the fastest way to spot a survey with a bad vertical datum.
Switching modes rewrites the colour buffer in place — there is no reload and no wait.
Point size that fits the cloud
A dense indoor scan and a county-wide aerial survey need point sizes three orders of magnitude apart. Rather than pick a wrong default, the viewer derives an initial size from the cloud's own bounding box and gives you a slider around it. Too small and you see through the surface; too large and detail turns to porridge.
Big files
A 60-million-point survey will not fit in browser memory, and pretending otherwise just crashes the tab. The viewer loads a representative subset within a budget you choose — from 500,000 up to 12 million points — and tells you plainly how many points the real file contains. LAZ files are decompressed on the fly with laz-perf.
The LAS header
LAS files carry a genuinely useful header, and reading it normally means opening a GIS package. The viewer surfaces all of it: version, point data record format, exact point count, scale factors and offsets, the bounding box in the file's own coordinate system, the generating software and the creation date.
That bounding box matters. LAS coordinates are usually in a projected CRS with values in the hundreds of thousands of metres. The viewer recentres the cloud so it renders near the origin, but the header panel still reports the true coordinates — so you can check the survey landed where it should.
Supported formats
- LAS — the ASPRS LiDAR standard, versions 1.0 through 1.4
- LAZ — compressed LAS, decompressed in-browser
- PLY — point clouds from scanners and photogrammetry, with colour
- XYZ — plain text coordinates, with optional RGB
- PCD — the Point Cloud Library format, ASCII and binary
Privacy
Survey data is often commercially or legally sensitive. Nothing here is uploaded — the file is parsed and rendered entirely on your own machine.