Dev tools · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Render a Street View scene as point cloud using the captured LiDAR data
http://callum.com/sandbox/webglex/streetcloud/ Managed to get the rendering working with help from other people generous enough open source and to write about their code.
Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Render a Street View scene as point cloud using the captured LiDAR data launched in 2014; newer entries below may have overtaken it.
- 1

I've been working on this project for about 4 years. It began as terrain only because world wide elevation data was publicly available. I then added buildings from OpenStreetMap (crowd sourced) and more recently from Overture Maps data. Some computer vision/machine learning advancements [1] in the past few years have made it possible to estimate tree canopy heights using satellite imagery alone making it possible to finally add trees to the map. The data isn't perfect, but it's within +/- 3 meters of so. Good enough to give a general idea for any location on Earth. Happy to answer…
2024 · shademap.app · its alternatives →
- 2

- 3

Instantly see a Google Street View of any supported location. Easily share and save your favourite views.
2012 · qsview.com · its alternatives →
- 4

It's been closed source for a long time while I worked on it on and off as a hobby research project, but yesterday the repo was made public for the first time under the MPL 2.0 license. A feature reel showing its capabilities can be found here: https://ktstephano.github.io/rendering/stratusgfx/feature_re... A technical breakdown of a single frame can be found here: https://ktstephano.github.io/rendering/stratusgfx/frame_anal... It's still in a very beta state (bugs and instability expected), but I felt like it was a good time to make it…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 5RT
2023 · antimatter15.com · its alternatives →
- 6
Render▲318Hey HN, I'm Anurag, founder and CEO of Render, a cloud for application developers. We've just launched Render Workflows, a way to define durable tasks by decorating plain TypeScript or Python functions and running them on Render without operating queues, worker pools, retry logic, and state management. Code example below [1]. The use cases we have in mind include agent loops, ETL/data pipelines, billing flows, and other long-running jobs. The model is simple: mark an existing function as a Task, deploy the repo as a Workflow, then trigger runs from your application code or via our API.…
2019 · render.com · its alternatives →
- 7

Hey HN, I made a site where you can draw on street-level panoramas. Your drawings persist and other people can see them in real time. Strokes get projected onto the 3D panorama so they wrap around buildings and follow the geometry, not just a flat overlay. Uses WebGL2 for rendering, Mapillary for the street imagery. The idea is for it to become a global canvas, anyone can leave a mark anywhere and others stumble onto it.
Mar 2026 · washere.live · its alternatives →
- 8

This is a service I've built to provide equirectangular cloud maps of the whole Earth, updated every 3 hours, for free. It's based on infrared and visible light data from EUMETSAT, processed to enhance the clouds and try to reduce the impact of surface temperatures on the final image. I built it because it's surprisingly hard to find these kinds of images in a format that's useful to developers and hobbyists. I was building a 3D ISS tracker and wanted to include live clouds but couldn't find anything good, so I got sidetracked, and here we are.
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 9

I'm the co-creator and maintainer of https://aframe.io/ and long time Web 3D graphics dev. Super excited about new techniques to author / render / represent 3D. Spark is a an open source library to easily integrate Gaussian splats in your THREE.js scene I worked with some friends and I hope you find useful. Looking forward to hearing what features / rendering techniques you would love to see next.
2025 · sparkjs.dev · its alternatives →
- 10AR
2018 · tylermw.com · its alternatives →
- 11

Over the weekend I was discussing the latest news relating to open weights with some of my non-techie friends. After 30 mins of waffling, I realised it is quite a long and interesting story, with many twists and turns. I've always wanted to create a 'long scroll' story, but have never found a suitable story to tell. This felt like a fun weekend project to undertake. The story itself doesn't have too many scroll effects (which is probably a good thing), it was more about trying to tell a story with a certain style that wouldn't really fit on my personal blog. Would love to get your feedback…
2020 · blog.scottlogic.com · its alternatives →
- 12

Browse and share GPU-made GIFs. Explore GLSL shader experiments, search by topic, and open any piece in the editor to learn or remix.
2018 · shadergif.com · its alternatives →
- 13

Create interactive Google Street View hyper-lapse animations
2014 · its alternatives →
- 14

Google released an API in May to get fetch 3D Tiles of anywhere on Earth. Using this in standard 3D engines like Blender is tricky because (1) the tiles are in a geographic coordinate system (2) you get a lot of little tiles at varying quality levels I wanted to simplify this so all you need to do is get an API key, select a map region and a zoom level, and get one combined glTF file that you can throw into any engine. Especially if you're just prototyping and want to see how this data looks in your engine before investing in figuring out all the nuances of the API & coordinate system. (Note…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 15MA
Hello HN! I’m excited to share this open-source community mashup showing the power and possibility of combining 3D Gaussian splat scans with traditional mesh-based 3D tiles maps in the browser. As you've probably seen on HN a bunch lately, Gaussian splats are a new method to allow custom 3D scans of scenes and objects [1] and Google Maps 3D Tiles API are the same 3D buildings and street views your familiar with in Google Earth or Google Maps, and recently they’ve been made available for inclusion in web apps. Combining splats + 3d map mixes highly detailed real-world custom micro-scans with…
2024 · maps-and-splats.glitch.me · its alternatives →
- 16

This is a GPU "software" raytracer (i.e. using manual ray-scene intersections and not RTX) written using the WebGPU API that renders glTF scenes. It supports many materials, textures, material & normal mapping, and heavily relies on multiple importance sampling to speed up convergence.
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 17
Mapbox GLJS V2▲116Interactive, customizable 3D maps in your browser
2020 · mapbox.com · its alternatives →
- 18

I'm working on a GPS track visualizer for quite some time. It shines in hilly and mountaineous terrain (where a 3D view makes more sense), but it also offers quite a lot of Strava-like features (statistics etc.). You can upload your GPX and FIT files manually, or sync directly with Garmin, Coros and Polar. See https://cubetrek.com for the live app and check out some examples there. It's free and opens source. Also, anyone who likes to work with 3D visualizations (especially Babylon.js), let me know if you like to help polish this thing further.
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 19

2021 · victorribeiro.com · its alternatives →
- 20

I've been going through Cem Yuksel's "Introduction to Computer Graphics" course and thought that writing a volume renderer would be a good way to test my knowledge. It is a common technique used to render 3D medical data. Works by ray marching a specific step size, reading a 3D texture (e.g. MRI data), and calculating opacity values. Code should be easy to get started with for anyone familiar with the JS ecosystem. Questions for the HN community: I spent 20-25% of the entire time just setting up the project and fighting issues with the JavaScript ecosystem. This experience has made me…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 21
Deepen 4d▲70LiDAR Point level instance and semantic segmentation
2019 · deepen.ai · its alternatives →
- 22IM
I was fascinated by this [0] and this video [1]. After many struggles, I finally built this app that traces images using circles similar to what these videos had shown. The most challenging part (to me) is to find a way to convert images to vector lines. I had tried Potrace, but its output is not suitable for my use case: too many small elements share the same border. Potrace's goal is to represent the original image faithfully using vector lines. But I want to trace the image edges. After searching and trying some Potrace alternatives in vain, I finally found my keyword. Surprisingly (to…
2022 · phqb.github.io · its alternatives →
- 23SV
2020 · callumprentice.github.io · its alternatives →
- 24EB
2017 · apoorvaj.io · its alternatives →
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Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →