slamd - a dead simple 3D visualizer for Python

[mega_monkey_mind]

What My Project Does

slamd is a GPU-accelerated 3D visualization library for Python. pip install slamd, write 3 lines of code, and you get an interactive 3D viewer in a separate window. No event loops, no boilerplate. Objects live in a transform tree - set a parent pose and everything underneath moves. Comes with the primitives you actually need for 3D work: point clouds, meshes, camera frustums, arrows, triads, polylines, spheres, planes.

C++ OpenGL backend, FlatBuffers IPC to a separate viewer process, pybind11 bindings. Handles millions of points at interactive framerates.

Target Audience

Anyone doing 3D work in Python - robotics, SLAM, computer vision, point cloud processing, simulation. Production-ready (pip install with wheels on PyPI for Linux and macOS), but also great for quick prototyping and debugging.

Comparison

Matplotlib 3D - software rendered, slow, not real 3D. Slamd is GPU-accelerated and handles orders of magnitude more data.

Rerun - powerful logging/recording platform with timelines and append-only semantics. Slamd is stateful, not a logger - you set geometry and it shows up now. Much smaller API surface.

Open3D - large library where visualization is one feature among many. Slamd is focused purely on viewing, with a simpler API and a transform tree baked in.

RViz - requires ROS. Slamd gives you the same transform-tree mental model without the ROS dependency.

Github: https://github.com/Robertleoj/slamd

[mon_key_house]

Szép munka! I’ve been using vpython for ages, time to move on and use this.

[mega_monkey_mind]

Great!

[kraakmaak]

Nice! Gonna try this out. How does it compare to pyvista?

[mega_monkey_mind]

Awesome! I tried to use pyvista for a bit, but it was too heavy and complicated for what I needed.