PCL: Visualize a point cloud

Question

I'm trying to visualize a point cloud using PCL CloudViewer. The problem is that I'm quite new to C++ and I have found two tutorials first demonstrating the creation of PointCloud and second demonstrating the visualization of a PointCloud. However, I'm not able to combine these two tutorials.

Here is what I have come up with:

#include <iostream>

#include <pcl/io/pcd_io.h>
#include <pcl/point_types.h>
#include <pcl/visualization/cloud_viewer.h>

int main (int argc, char** argv)
{
  pcl::PointCloud<pcl::PointXYZ> cloud;
  
  // Fill in the cloud data
  cloud.width    = 5;
  cloud.height   = 1;
  cloud.is_dense = false;
  cloud.points.resize (cloud.width * cloud.height);

  for (size_t i = 0; i < cloud.points.size (); ++i)
  {
    cloud.points[i].x = 1024 * rand () / (RAND_MAX + 1.0f);
    cloud.points[i].y = 1024 * rand () / (RAND_MAX + 1.0f);
    cloud.points[i].z = 1024 * rand () / (RAND_MAX + 1.0f);
  }

  pcl::visualization::CloudViewer viewer ("Simple Cloud Viewer");
  viewer.showCloud (cloud);

  while (!viewer.wasStopped ())
  {
  }

  return (0);
}

but that even do not compile:

error: no matching function for call to   
‘pcl::visualization::CloudViewer::showCloud(pcl::PointCloud<pcl::PointXYZ>&)’

Answer 1

To give the answer straight away:

pcl::PointCloud<pcl::PointXYZRGB>::Ptr ptrCloud(&cloud);

Then put in ptrCloud in the viewer, it's what it expects:

viewer.showCloud (ptrCloud);