Interesting, so it's the data they provide that is sparse. If you expand the view to full screen, and stare straight-on at the wall, you can clearly see the 'sparse' pixels form a circle around the camera on the ground and at the sky.
I don't really know how LIDAR works, so I don't know if it's something intrinsic to the process, or a decision made by the engineers.
Yah, I've noticed that too - I wondered if it was an. artifact of the way I render the points but since the building look mostly right, I figured that was the way it is.
Thank you so much. I use the built in point cloud primitive which I think is a list of billboards geometry and all you can change is the size of each point.
Okay, so it has nothing to do with the orientation of the point planes.
Having thought about it some more, I think this is a consequence of the reduction of surface area hit by the LIDAR rays, as the square of it's distance. Basically, the rays are cast in a spherical distribution (which has a surface area of 4pir^2). So the further out you go, the rays "capture" less of the environment, and you get the sort of sparse pixels at a distance.
So those circles are just reductions in pixel density that are proportional to linear distance from the center of the LIDAR sphere. You can kind of see how depending on the distance to the building walls, the surrounding 'halo' of circular pixel density increases or decreases.
I don't really know how LIDAR works, so I don't know if it's something intrinsic to the process, or a decision made by the engineers.