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 colour 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 colour attributes. E57 is listed in the supported formats table for Swyvl's full platform, which converts E57 to a streaming format on upload; the local browser viewer does not parse E57 directly because the format's XML + binary structure requires server-side pre-processing to render at scale.

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.

Colour modes

Four display modes are available from the toolbar inside the viewer. RGB shows the true colour recorded by the scanner or photogrammetry pipeline — only available if your file contains colour 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 colour scale (blue at the lowest points, yellow at the highest) to reveal terrain structure at a glance. Classification colours 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. Files up to around 2 GB render well on a modern desktop with a dedicated GPU; a mid-range laptop handles most files under 500 MB without any noticeable lag. For datasets larger than 2 GB — dense urban surveys, full corridor scans, multi-return airborne LiDAR — the browser viewer will still load but may reduce point density to maintain frame rate. Swyvl's full platform converts those files to streaming Potree format, which tiles the data spatially so even billion-point surveys load progressively without hitting RAM limits.