View point clouds in your browser

This tool lets surveyors, engineers, and anyone working with spatial data open a point cloud file and inspect it instantly — no software to install, no account required. Drop a file onto the viewer, and your point cloud renders in three dimensions directly in the browser using WebGL. Rotate around the data, zoom into individual features, switch color modes, and get a feel for the dataset before you export it to CAD, GIS, or a client deliverable.

It is designed for quick desktop review. If you regularly deliver point clouds to clients, Swyvl's full platform adds persistent storage, streaming for large files, and branded share links — but this free viewer covers everything you need for personal inspection.

Supported formats

The viewer reads LAS versions 1.0 through 1.4 — including the extended point data record formats introduced in 1.4 — and LAZ, the compressed equivalent. LAZ files are decompressed in-browser using laz-perf before rendering, so there is no round-trip to a server. PLY files are supported for basic point cloud viewing, including files with per-point color attributes. For E57, the tool reads the file's index rather than its points: drop one in and it lists the scans, the point count, the 360° photos stored in it and whether a coordinate system is set. Swyvl's full platform converts E57 to a streaming format on upload.

Opening an E57 file online

Drop an E57 on the viewer above and it reads the file's own index in your browser: how many scans and points it holds, how many 360° photos are stored in it (counting Leica and Matterport cube faces as one photo per setup), whether a coordinate system is set and which scanner wrote it. It doesn't load the points or upload anything, so a 50 GB scan answers in seconds. A terrestrial scan is too big to draw in a browser tab, so the free tool stops there. To open the scan itself, upload it to a free Swyvl account (5 GB, no credit card). Swyvl converts it on upload and streams it at full size, with scan positions shown in the cloud. If the E57 holds 360° photos, each one opens side by side with the point cloud. Measure distances, areas and heights, including from the photos; pin notes on what you can see, with a sketch drawn over the view; and send the scan to a client as a link they open with nothing to install. If the tool finds no 360° photos, see which exports keep them. More on the point cloud viewer, or read what an E57 file is.

Privacy — your file never leaves your device

The viewer reads your file using the browser's File API and processes it entirely in memory using WebGL. Nothing is sent over the network. There are no analytics on file contents, no server-side parsing, and no upload step. This is true for files of any size — the data stays on your machine from the moment you drop the file to the moment you close the tab.

Color modes

Four display modes are available from the toolbar inside the viewer. RGB shows the true color recorded by the scanner or photogrammetry pipeline — only available if your file contains color attributes. Intensity maps each point's laser return strength to a greyscale gradient, which is useful for distinguishing surfaces that share the same elevation. Elevation applies a height-based color scale (blue at the lowest points, yellow at the highest) to reveal terrain structure at a glance. Classification colors points by their LAS classification code — ground in brown, vegetation in green, buildings in red, water in blue, and so on — following the standard 19-class palette defined in the LAS specification.

Navigation controls

Rotate: left-click and drag. Pan: right-click and drag (or two-finger drag on a trackpad). Zoom: scroll wheel, or pinch on a trackpad. The Reset view button in the toolbar returns the camera to the initial framing. These controls work in Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge on both Windows and macOS.

File size guidance

The viewer downsamples large files automatically to stay within GPU memory limits. It opens files up to about 1 GB, because past that a browser tab runs out of memory while reading the whole file; a mid-range laptop handles most files under 500 MB without any noticeable lag. For bigger datasets (dense urban surveys, full corridor scans, multi-return airborne LiDAR), Swyvl's full platform converts the file to COPC, which streams only the points in view, so even billion-point surveys load progressively.