3DView (VS Code extension)

View COLMAP reconstructions, 3D meshes, point clouds, 3D Gaussian splats and 3D point tracks in one interactive Three.js scene, right in the editor.

What it opens

• COLMAP reconstructions (.bin / .txt) — colored point cloud plus camera frustums, each textured with its source image. Click a frustum to fly into that camera's point of view.
• Meshes — glTF / GLB / OBJ / PLY, lit and shaded by default, with unlit-albedo and wireframe modes.
• Point clouds — .ply without faces. One that carries no colors of its own is drawn in a color from a shared palette, so several stay tellable apart.
• 3D Gaussian splats — .ply / .splat / .spz / .ksplat, rendered as real per-view-sorted splats, as solid ellipsoids, or as bare centers.
• 3D point tracks — .npz / .npy trajectories, one polyline per tracked point, with sliders for trail length, opacity, density, line width and temporal smoothing.
• Temporal (4D) items — open several reconstructions, meshes or splats as the timesteps of one capture: one Scene row with a timeline to scrub or play back.

Open many of them together, then show/hide, rename, remove or nudge each one's position and rotation from the Scene panel.

Usage

Use the 3DView icon in the Activity Bar (or the Command Palette) to Open Reconstruction / Open Asset / Open Asset Folder / Open Empty Viewer, then the Scene panel's + to add more. A COLMAP model is a folder of cameras/images/points3D (e.g. sparse/0/); an asset is a single mesh, point cloud, splat or point-track file. Open Asset Folder takes every asset file directly inside a folder in one go — the way to load a per-frame capture, and the way to open several files at once over a remote connection, where VS Code's file dialog can only select one.

You can also drag & drop onto the viewer. Dragging out of VS Code's own Explorer needs Shift held as you drop — without it VS Code routes the drop to the editor area — or skip the drag and right-click the file(s) or folder in the Explorer → Open in 3DView.

The 3DView panel holds the display controls — point size, frustum size / line width / color, camera field of view and roll, a light / dark / dim theme, and Render viewpoint, which saves a transparent PNG of the current view at 1× / 2× / 4×.

Elsewhere

Try it without installing anything at the web demo. This extension is one host of a shared viewer core; a PyCharm / JetBrains plugin is another. See the project README for architecture and development.

License: MIT.