A Point-Based and Image-Based Multi-Pass Rendering Technique for Visualizing Massive 3D Point Clouds in VR Environments
Sören Discher, Leon Masopust, Sebastian Schulz, Rico Richter, Jürgen Döllner · Journal of WSCG · 2018
Real-time rendering for 3D point clouds allows for interactively exploring and inspecting real-world assets, sites, or regions on a broad range of devices but has to cope with their vastly different computing capabilities.Virtual reality (VR) applications rely on high frame rates (i.e., around 90 fps as opposed to 30 -60 fps) and show high sensitivity to any kind of visual artifacts, which are typical for 3D point cloud depictions (e.g., holey surfaces or visual clutter due to inappropriate point sizes).We present a novel rendering system that allows for an immersive, nausea-free exploration of arbitrary large 3D point clouds on state-of-the-art VR devices such as HTC Vive and Oculus Rift.Our approach applies several point-based and image-based rendering techniques that are combined using a multipass rendering pipeline.The approach does not require to derive generalized, mesh-based representations in a preprocessing step and preserves precision and density of the raw 3D point cloud data.The presented techniques have been implemented and evaluated with massive real-world data sets from aerial, mobile, and terrestrial acquisition campaigns containing up to 2.6 billion points to show the practicability and scalability of our approach.