Ouster

Ouster makes LIDAR devices for scanning 3D environments with lasers. TouchDesigner supports real-time point cloud capture and recording with the Ouster LIDAR sensors running firmware 2.0+. Ouster data can be manipulated live with TouchDesigner’s procedural node-based tools and TouchDesigner features that support working with point cloud data on the GPU.

Ouster OS1

Ouster Features Supported in TouchDesigneredit

• TouchDesigner provides direct support for the full Ouster product line. Sensors must run firmware 2.0 or higher.
• Capture formats include visual Panoramic and Scan Order formats.
• X, Y, Z, Range, Intensity and Noise planes are flexibly mapped to RGBA image channels on the GPU.
• Additional sensor data includes IMU (Inertial Measurement Unit gyroscope and accelerometer), packet counts and matrices.
• Time Sync Mode supports multiple devices in the same area (Internal OSC, Sync Pulse In, PTP 1588). Auto startup features, window rejection mode are supported.

Point Cloud Features in TouchDesigner Boost Data Manipulationedit

• TouchDesigner can capture in real-time all 7+ channels of the Ouster's 32-bit floating point data streams.
• Buffer select operations provide an easy way to extract device channels and manipulate them on the GPU with procedural node-based tools that minimize or eliminate the need for coding.
• The captured point data can be viewed as 3D point clouds or 2D arrays in any TOP viewer.
• RGBA Normalized viewer mode provides a way to see channel data in a normalized luminance space for easy viewing and inspecting of 32-bit data.
• Points can be rendered with the Line Material, controlling point size based on distance to camera.
• The enhancing instancing engine provides a method for directly mapping point cloud data from TOPs into 3D camera renders. The instancer accepts a different 32bit RGBA texture for each attribute class.
• TouchDesigner can record Ouster streams as a sequence of OpenEXR files to storage in real-time. It can record unlimited channels of 32-bit floating point data along with customizable header data for storing IMU and other meta information. This can be played back in real-time.

See: Ouster TOP, Ouster Select TOP, Point File In TOP, Movie File Out TOP.