Experiencing Interior Environments: New Approaches for the Immersive Display of Large-Scale Point Cloud Data

This document introduces a new application for rendering massive LiDAR point cloud data sets of interior environments within high-resolution immersive VR display systems. Overall contributions are: to create an application which is able to visualize large-scale point clouds at interactive rates in immersive display environments, to develop a flexible pipeline for processing LiDAR data sets that allows display of both minimally processed and more rigorously processed point clouds, and to provide visualization mechanisms that produce accurate rendering of interior environments to better understand physical aspects of interior spaces. The work introduces three problems with producing accurate immersive rendering of LiDAR point cloud data sets of interiors and presents solutions to these problems. Rendering performance is compared between the developed application and a previous immersive LiDAR viewer.