What is Project Pointless?

Creating a smart and universally reusable workflow which efficiently identifies and visualises the empty, pointless, space directly from any interior point cloud source using an octree approach, and computes the shortest path through an empty space.

Why

Explorative point clouds

Traditionally point clouds are being used to derive geometric models. These models are then used for all kinds of applications. However, with this intermediary step lots of information is lost. Therefore, Project Pointless enables applications to be built directly on any point cloud.

Walkthrough

The empty space inside a point can be used for many different kinds of applications: on-the-fly pathfinding in point clouds, direct volume calculations, space fitting queries (does a lorry fit under a bridge or a ship through a waterway?). Also, as soon as the empty space is calculated the density of the point cloud is irrelevant since it won't affect the empty spaces inside the point cloud.

How

Point Cloud

A point cloud will be the input of our application

Octree

The point cloud will then be stored in a database as an octree. This way clusters of points and clusters of empty space are stored and therefore easy to retrieve

Visualization

When visualizing the point cloud the mapped open space can be used for showing routes calculated inside the it.

Erik

Florian

Ivo

Olivier

Tom