Plugin Architecture For 3D Display

[micahcc]

It would be nice to have the ability to display any message in the 3D visualizer without producing markers ahead of time similar to Plotting doesn't require a special format.

Is there any work going on to do this? It is obviously more difficult to write a generic message to message conversion system than simply finding a field to plot. Maybe allowing users to dump a javascript function or class along the lines of:

{
   topic: 'xxx',
   convert: function(msg: ThingMsg) {
        ...
        return markers;
   }
}

Any thoughts? Thanks for doing great work btw.

[vidaaudrey]

Hey @MicahChambers, Webviz currently already have such structure called Node. You can define a Webviz Node like this:

      const NodeB = {
        datatypes: {}, 
        inputs: ["/webviz/a/counter"],
        output: { name: "/webviz/b", datatype: "b" },
        callback({ message }) {
          return {
            messages: [makeNodeMessage("/webviz/b", "b", { count: message.message.count })],
            state: undefined,
          };
        },
      };

and register it in loadWebviz, e.g

nodes: () => {
    const NodeB = require("SOME_PATH").default;
    return [NodeB];
}

All panels will have access to the node messages. We are also actively working on a feature called Node Playground which will allow people to create Webviz nodes dynamically. Stay tuned!

[micahcc]

Thanks Audey! Thats perfect!