I did a bit of work with point-cloud/lidar data during a placement with an engineering company. They were actually driving down highways with LIDAR apparatus at

I did a bit of work with point-cloud/lidar data during a placement with an engineering company. They were actually driving down highways with LIDAR apparatus attached to a vehicle to build a point clouds of roads/similar. The sheer detail (points per inch/similar) in the point clouds whilst beneficial also requires ridiculous amounts of RAM to do any form of processing. If rendered as points, it's only useful at a distance, as you zoom in it becomes a void with sparse points. I tried using PCL[1] to convert a point-cloud into a mesh and I seem to recall it using upwards of 6 times the amount of memory of the stored points (before I ran out of memory). I was only there a short time so I never did get round to making it work. [1]http://pointclouds.org/ http://pointclouds.org/