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.
I've been working on a 27' Mac for Scene registration since I began scanning four years ago. With a fast i7 chip, plenty of RAM (32gb) it works quite well using Parallels VM to run Win7 - except for Trimble RealWorks and ReCap, that require OpenGL 3.3+. Parallels only supports OpenGL 2.2. I later installed Bootcamp to maximize all of the RAM on the Mac and OpenGL 3.3+ on the Mac system.
Both work smoothly, giving me flexibility for whatever I need to do. The latest 27' iMacs come with 5K monitors.very nice! @Steve: I'm not the one who said 'really big point cloud' ( ) but here's what I can say: with the 64 bits version you can load several hundreds of millions of points without too much problem. Generally you can load between 50 and 100M points with 1 Gb of memory (it depends on whether the points are colored or associated to normals, etc.).
Some users even reported having loaded more than a billion points with the standard version and 3 billion in command line mode ( you may have to tweak the virtual memory settings of Windows). Anyway displaying more than 200M points would be veryyyy slow (even with a high end graphic card). Since version 2.6.2 we use a LOD structure to get a more reactive display with very big clouds. Onedrive for business sync shared with me folder mac mac.
It takes some time to prepare - computations are done in the background - but once ready the interactivity is much better. Regarding the current topic, the only issue would be that the 2.6.2 version is not available on Mac yet. Danielgm wrote:@Steve: I'm not the one who said 'really big point cloud' That was me! I guess what I was getting at is that if you work in Scene, for example, and you create a project with say 20 scans, and you then export that data as a.pts file or something similar, you can end up with 100's of millions of points (depending on your scan resolution of course). Expecting clients to view this on a mac (or anything for that matter) without specialized software is unrealistic.
Cloudcompare will help the OP in getting the data to his client, but it won't solve the problem of viewing 'really big point clouds' - as in more that about 100M points. By specialized software I mean Recap, Scene, Scene LT etc. - Suites designed specifically for handling multiple long range laser scans That's definitely not to say that cloudcompare isn't useful, in fact I think it's miles ahead of some very expensive pieces of software out there.