Pangolin

Why we included this project

Pangolin is the visualization layer behind a large share of open-source computer vision and robotics research; if you've run a SLAM or structure-from-motion pipeline, you've likely seen its output. It's a C++ toolkit that wraps OpenGL windowing and viewport management behind a small API, with 3D navigation built in, so you can drop a live 3D scene, camera trajectory, or point cloud into a prototype without writing platform-specific GUI code. Beyond rendering, it handles video input and output across ordinary and machine-vision cameras, and includes debugging utilities like plotters and a live Python console for tweaking variables on the fly. For teams building CV or robotics demos, or anyone needing a quick interactive 3D viewer for numeric data, it saves a lot of boilerplate. It runs on all major desktop platforms and the web via Emscripten, and most dependencies are optional, so you compile only what you need.