February 20, 2024

Maneuvering laser scans now like playing a video game

Image via Cintoo

Cintoo, the Visual Twin platform for Digital Twin, AEC and Industry 4.0 customers, has unveiled a cutting-edge breakthrough in the visualization of reality capture data. 

Navigating a 3D point cloud has always been a challenge for non-expert users. Already, Cintoo, with its mesh-based streaming and viewing technology at the resolution of the source point cloud (no decimation), has overcome some of this challenge by truly facilitating the interpretation of reality capture data. Cintoo’s technology makes scan data much closer to the reality of what it represents by creating 3D surfaces out of 3D points. Afterall, the world is made of surfaces, not points! 

Now, Cintoo is bridging yet another gap in its democratization mandate for scan data. 3D experts have known for many years that the best way to navigate in a 3D virtual space is similar to Google’s Street View facilitation, i.e. jumping from bubble view to bubble view. It is also known in the Virtual Reality world that the only way not to get dizzy in a 3D immersive walkthrough is to teleport the user from vantage point to vantage point automatically. 

Combining these needs for a more seamless user experience, Cintoo is proud to announce its new “teleport camera” which allows users to walk through scan data by creating an unlimited number of panoramic virtual vantage points that will complement the source panoramas of the laser scan data.  

Maneuvering your laser scans is now just like using a video game, making all the benefits available to novices and experts alike. Cintoo has managed to provide easy access and utilization of full “teleportation” which provides the ability to move from one location or point of view to another instantaneously and effortlessly. 

Cintoo’s CEO Dominique Pouliquen said, “We are bringing successful proven 3D navigation concepts from the gaming industry into our B2B industrial worlds. Democratizing the use of laser scan point clouds has always been our focus, with no compromise on the source data accuracy and density. We believe that the trustful, but expensive, laser scan data should be used by many, many more people that are not expert surveyors or VDC engineers. Cintoo has now gamified the use of laser scans to all users to maneuver to any position and point of view within the reality data with no prior 3D expertise.” 

Akin to a superpower, the new teleportation capability leverages Cintoo’s unique point cloud-to-mesh compression and streaming technology to its pinnacle. Powered by Cintoo’s TurboMesh engine, users can now generate any virtual vantage point by rendering 3D surfaces based on the best mesh contribution from each original scan position (or set-up) in real time in the WebGL viewer. The same teleportation camera is now being embedded into Cintoo’s Unreal plug-in as well to allow for full 3D navigation in the game engine, at the same high mesh resolution as the source point cloud. This utilization speaks to industrial metaverse experiences that require uncompromised as-built data. 

This new functionality is tailored to all users, including non-technical and support personnel as well as clients, to reap the benefits of the Cintoo platform and its capabilities, such as comparing BIM and CAD models to “as-built” conditions, or being the single source truth for Digital Twin applications. 

Pouliquen went on to say that “AEC and Digital Twin users can now easily move to any position without being restricted to the scanned points of view. You can also go to upper or lower floors of your “as-built” scan data with just the move of your mouse. This is truly a major development in the proliferation of the use of laser scanning point clouds to use Reality Data as the visual source of trustful information. Now the Visual Twin platform provides the user experience needed to allow all users to easily access, maneuver and utilize the Reality Capture data that will save money and time for your projects.”  

Source: Cintoo

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