Potential AR feature - point clouds

[bialpio]

Creating an issue to gauge interest for a new feature, I expect it to be mostly relevant for AR. Both ARCore and ARKit expose such APIs (unsure about other platforms). Do we think this is something worth pursuing, or is that a too-low-level API?

/tpac to see what people think, probably would not take more than 15 (no API shape to talk about)

[DRx3D]

Several 3D organizations are currently working on various aspects of point clouds. OGC has active work in the field. MPEG is working with some proposals. Khronos is investigating the delivery and rendering of point cloud data. JPEG also is pursuing Point Clouds in some manner. Not all of the work is for AR, and some (especially MPEG) is done with streaming in mind (live active).

I am interested in this discussion if it can be on Friday.

[AdaRoseCannon]

I've moved this over to Proposals as it is new work :)

[bialpio]

Summary of the TPAC discussions:

• scope of work would be exposing an API that allows access to the point clouds used by the underlying XR system within the XR session
• example APIs that this could be implemented on top of: ARCore, ARKit, no corresponding API in OpenXR.
• some interest from 8thWall, could save them work in having to detect feature points JS-side (pros: ease of implementation, potentially better perf since they won't need to do the work that the XR system is already doing anyway)
• backwards compatibility is a potential risk: exposing point clouds API means that the implementations will need to commit themselves to a specific behavior
• cross compatibility is a potential risk: XR experiences that would otherwise work well across most / all systems could take a dependency on this and would not work in some cases, depending on the hardware and the framework being used

Please let me know if I messed something up or misunderstood. @thetuvix, @nbutko, @DRx3D, @fordacious - FYI as you've been involved in the discussion.