Optimizing Dasher 360: using a point cloud to display sensor markers

At the Forge Accelerator in Munich, back in December, while I spent most of my time answering what questions I could about Forge I also showed up with a question of my own.

In the original prototype of Dasher 360 we used code from a very helpful sample that showed how to add SVG markers to the DOM inside the Forge viewer. The original sample showed this in the context of adding markup to a model: on our side we wanted it to mark the location of sensors in the model. While this was great for small numbers of sensors, it didn’t really scale: not only did it get slow – each sensor needed its own set of DOM elements – but managing occlusion from existing model geometry proved to be really challenging.

So while Philippe Leefsma and I were sharing a taxi to the Accelerator’s location in Munich, we talked about this problem. Philippe’s suggestion was to make use of the capability in THREE.js to display point clouds. His big question was whether the version of THREE.js being…

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