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LidarKit

View LAS and LAZ files in your browser

Drop a point cloud in and look at it in 3D. Nothing is uploaded, and there is no fixed size limit.

Drop your LAS or LAZ file here

or choose a file

LAS 1.0–1.4 · multi-gigabyte files welcome

…or open one from a URL. A .copc.laz file streams straight from the host — only the parts you look at are read. Anything else shows its full metadata without downloading the points.

What you can check in a few seconds

A viewer earns its place when it answers a question faster than opening the file in desktop software would. The common ones:

  • Is this file what I was told it is? Extent, point count and density are visible immediately.
  • Was it actually classified? Colour by classification. A delivery that is entirely class 1 was never classified, whatever the paperwork says.
  • How much of it is ground, and how dense is it? The statistics panel counts every class, return number and the density over every point in the file. How to read those numbers.
  • Does it have a coordinate system? The panel below the view reports the CRS, or tells you plainly that none is embedded.
  • Is there noise to clean up? Stray points far above or below the surface stand out at once when coloured by elevation.
  • Did the scan capture colour? The RGB option appears only when the file actually carries it.

Controls

ActionMouseTouch
OrbitDragOne finger drag
ZoomScroll wheelPinch
PanRight-drag, or shift + dragTwo finger drag
ReframeReset viewReset view
Floor planP or Floor planFloor plan
SectionS or SectionSection

Floor plans and sections

Floor plan looks straight down through a thin horizontal slab of the cloud. Section looks side-on through a thin vertical one, across the file's X or Y axis. Both use an orthographic lens, so a metre is the same length everywhere on screen and the grid and scale bar can be trusted. The plan finds horizontal surfaces from the heights of the points and starts 1.2 m above the lowest. On a building scan that cuts through doors and windows, and on an aerial tile it shows building footprints and tree trunks, with the roofs offered as levels. A section of an aerial tile is a terrain profile with the buildings standing on it.

Lengths follow the file's own unit. A tile in US survey feet gets its cut heights, grid and scale bar in feet, and the panel says where the unit came from: stated by the file, read from the name of its coordinate system, or assumed. Either view saves as a PNG, at a ground resolution or a print scale such as 1:500, with a footer that states the cut, the resolution and how sparsely the file was sampled. Both are slices of the points, drawn to scale, not traced drawings.

How large files are handled

The file is decoded in a Web Worker, streaming through the same WebAssembly build of laz-perf that powers the converter. Points are taken at an even stride across the whole file rather than from the beginning, so what you see is a fair sample of the entire scan, not just its first corner.

The display budget is 2 million points. A 40-million-point scan is shown at every twentieth point; the viewer tells you the stride it chose and the true total. Your file is never modified — this is a display limit, not a conversion. If you need a different format, convert it.

One detail worth knowing, because it is a common bug in browser point cloud viewers: LAS coordinates are usually projected, in the hundreds of thousands of metres. Passed straight to a GPU as 32-bit floats, they quantise to a visible lattice. This viewer subtracts the cloud centre before the cast, which is why a UTM cloud looks smooth here.

What this viewer does not do

Deliberately kept out of scope, so the parts that exist are fast and correct:

  • No editing, cropping or filtering. A plan or section hides points on screen; the file is never cut.
  • No measurement tools.
  • No plan or section while a COPC file is streaming. Only the octree nodes in view are loaded, and a thin slice of those would be a coarse, misleading subset.

Level-of-detail streaming does exist, but only for files that carry the index it needs: drop a .copc.laz here, or open one from a URL, and it streams instead. See the COPC viewer.

This is for the case where you have a file, a browser, and one question.

Frequently asked questions

How do I open a LAZ file without installing software?
Drop the .laz file onto the viewer above. It is decoded on your own machine and rendered with WebGL, so there is nothing to install and nothing to upload. LAS files work the same way.
Are my files uploaded to view them?
No. There is no upload endpoint and no server component — the file is read through the browser's File API, decoded in a Web Worker, and drawn straight to a canvas. This makes it usable for survey data you are not permitted to send to a third party.
Is there a file size limit?
No limit on the file itself. Very large clouds are subsampled for display — the viewer keeps up to 2 million points and takes an even spread across the whole file — so a multi-gigabyte scan opens without exhausting memory. The file is only read, never altered.
Why does it show fewer points than my file contains?
Because drawing every point of a 300-million-point scan would exhaust GPU memory and drop the frame rate to nothing. The viewer displays an even sample and tells you the stride it used. The full point count is always shown alongside so you know what you are looking at.
Can I colour the points by classification?
Yes. Choose Classification in the colour menu to shade points by their ASPRS class — ground, vegetation, building, water and the rest — which is the quickest way to check whether a delivered file was actually classified. Elevation, intensity and embedded RGB are also available, with RGB shown only when the file carries it.
Can I get a classification histogram and point density?
Yes. Once a file has loaded, the Point statistics panel under the view lists every class present with its exact point count, the return-number distribution, elevation and intensity histograms with percentiles, and the point density over the bounding box. Class and return counts, extents and density are exact over every point in the file; on a large file the elevation and intensity distributions come from the evenly strided display sample, and the panel says which.
Can I get a floor plan or a cross-section from a LAS file?
Yes. Press Floor plan (or P) for a thin horizontal slice seen from above, or Section (or S) for a thin vertical slice seen side-on, across the file's X or Y axis. Both are orthographic, so the grid and scale bar are true. The plan starts 1.2 m above the lowest floor it finds in the heights of the points, and lists every level it finds as a button. On an aerial tile those are the ground and the roofs, and a section is a terrain and building profile. Either can be saved as a PNG at a set ground resolution or print scale. These are slices of the points, not traced CAD drawings. They work on whole LAS and LAZ files; a streamed COPC file only holds the octree nodes in view, so a slice of one would be built from a coarse subset.
What if my LAS file is in feet?
The plan and section read the unit from the file's coordinate system. A file in US survey feet gets its cut heights, slab thickness, grid and scale bar in feet, and a 1:100 export is still 1:100. Where the file names its coordinate system but not the unit, the unit is taken from the name: EPSG marks every foot-based system with (ft) or (ftUS). A file with no coordinate system at all is assumed to be in metres, and the panel says so. A file in latitude and longitude has no scale to draw to, so the buttons are off for it.
How do I move around the point cloud?
Drag to orbit, scroll to zoom, and hold shift or use the right mouse button to pan. On a touchscreen, one finger orbits and two fingers pinch to zoom and pan. Reset view returns to the framed starting position.
Which point formats does the viewer support?
Point data record formats 0, 1, 2, 3, 6, 7 and 8, across LAS 1.0 to 1.4. Formats 4, 5, 9 and 10 store full waveform data and are not supported. RGB colour is read from formats 2, 3, 7 and 8.
Do I need a powerful computer?
Any machine with a modern browser and working WebGL will do, including phones. Rendering is one draw call, so the limit is usually GPU memory rather than speed — and the subsampling budget is set to stay within what integrated graphics handle comfortably.

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