On Mon, May 25, 2015 at 4:48 PM, Miguel Campusano mcampusa@dcc.uchile.cl wrote:
Rviz is a good visualization, but it focuses on a representing the data in a 3d environment. Rviz, in my experience, represents the interactions of the robot (with its sensors) in the environment, you can draw maps and do a lot of things.
rviz is not only for 3D but also for 2D viz. Look at this video for example: http://wiki.ros.org/navigation/Tutorials/Using%20rviz%20with%20the%20Navigat...
However, rviz does not provide access to the data itself. Long history short, while I can see there is an object with the laser scan at a certain distance, I can not see the actual distance of the object. Sometimes we want more info about the data to see what values are best suited to use in our programs.
Yes, you are right rviz does not provide access to the data and is quite difficult to customize to specific needs. You have to write plugins in order to add more visualisations.
Having a robotic data viz engine that could be extended with ROASSAL scripting could be nice. This is what you are trying to do ?