3D plot in java. Java3D or Jmonkey [closed]

Question

I wanna plot a 3D points cloud ( say 100000 points) in Java, being able to drag and rotate it and select one of the plotted 3D points and get x,y,z of it by clicking on it. I am concerned about the continuation of support for java3D and at the same time I see that java3D is still a bigger community and a lot more active than JMonkey3 which is the stable version of jme3. I wanna deploy it as an applet too.

What technology should I choose?

Answer 1

Java3D isn't really designed for huge point clouds. It's designed for managed scene graphs, whereas for big point clouds you typically want to do some pretty direct OpenGL calls.

You are better off going with jMonkeyEngine (which has it's own point cloud/particle effect subsystem) or LWJGL (which is what jMonkeyEngine uses under the hood and will give you low-level OpenGL access)

All of the above can be used in applets (the user will probably have to approve lifting of Applet security restrictions to allow native OpenGL access), although I would recommend WebStart as an alternative if you are trying to do anything more sophisticated.