Real-time point cloud visualisation in a webapp

[Nikola Dafinski]

Hey RobotWebTools team, I've recently discovered all the amazing tools that you've compiled and I find them really insanely cool, so first of all, big kudos to you! Now onto my issue, I'm trying to build a web application that would be hosted on a machine running a SLAM algorithm in real time. I would then like to send the point cloud generated by that algorithm to be visualised in the web app, again, in real time, on any device that can connect to the host machine so you can see the complete map being built as you scan. I've already tried some of your example code provided and managed to get a simple viewer window running and connect to ROS and show the point cloud, and that was fairly painless and runs perfectly on the host machine under localhost. However, when I connect to the host from another device on the same network using the host's IP, the visualisation becomes quite a bit worse, the whole device starts lagging, CPU usage goes up to max and the point cloud updates a lot less frequently. I've tested on a Windows 10 laptop, and an iOS device. On the host machine I'm using an OS1-128 sensor but the map generated by the SLAM is fairly downsampled, but I guess it still adds up pretty quickly. The lidar works at 10hz and the map is also being published at 10hz. So, as my knowledge here is pretty limited, I'm not really sure what the problem might be - is it the wireless connection, is it the websocket connection or maybe just that it takes a lot of time for ros3d to parse through the data and render it? Do you have any ideas on what I could try and how I should go about making sure my connection and my server are stable enough to support all the data being pushed? And if the problem is parsing and rendering the data on the client-side, is there a way for me to "stream" my output from RViz, for example, so that I could do the rendering calculations on the host machine as well and just show the output to the client?

Thank you so much in advance for your help!