Thursday, January 7, 2016

MeshLab in javascript

We are proud to present the first beta, experimental, buggy, incomplete version of MeshLabJS, the client-side, run-in-browser port of MeshLab. 
Yes, a version of MeshLab that runs directly inside the browser.


It is still rudimental, very minimal, but yet it is a nice example of how current browsers are able to run C++ code compiled into a javascript (thanks to emscripten) at a pretty decent speed. WebGL (via three.js) is used for the rendering. 
Just to clarify it totally runs inside your browser, no 3D data is transferred to a server for processing, all the computation are done (in javascript) locally. Your data is safe as in a classical desktop app. 
It is a bit more than an experiment, there are only a few tens of filters (more to come!), and no fancy tools, but some classics like the renowned quadric simplifier and radiance scaling rendering mode, are available.

As usual everything is opensource, this time on github. If you like it star it on github and if you need some specific meshlab filter, just ask for it on the github issue page.