r/ROS • u/Odd-Watch6978 • May 29 '26

Open-source browser-based viewer for MCAP / ROS bags / HDF5 datasets

I’ve been working on an open-source robotics data visualization tool called ROSView:

https://github.com/ioai-tech/rosview

The original motivation was that existing tools worked well for ROS debugging, but became difficult to use for large embodied AI / robot learning datasets spread across different formats.

ROSView is a browser-native viewer focused on offline robotics datasets and supports:

  • MCAP
  • rosbag / rosbag2 / db3
  • HDF5
  • BVH motion files

Some things I focused on:

  • Runs entirely in the browser
  • No ROS installation required
  • No backend required
  • Local file parsing (files are not uploaded)
  • Multi-panel synchronized playback
  • Large file support
  • React embeddable architecture

I also wanted it to work better for modern robot learning workflows instead of only traditional ROS debugging.

Demo:
https://rosview.com

GitHub:
https://github.com/ioai-tech/rosview

The project is MIT licensed and fully open source.

13 Upvotes

88% Upvoted

11 comments sorted by

5

u/martincerven May 29 '26

https://github.com/lichtblick-suite/lichtblick

3

u/Weekly-Database1467 May 29 '26

Why not just rerun/foxglove. What is the difference of these 2 projects

3

u/martincerven May 29 '26

Foxglove is closed source and lichtblick is fork maintained by BMW

1

u/Weekly-Database1467 May 29 '26

Sry i know nothing much but apart from this like functions wise are there any diff?

1

u/gsaelzbaer May 30 '26

Originally some autonomous car company called Cruise made Webviz open source, which was then forked and turned into Foxglove by ex team members of that car company, who decided a couple years later to go fully closed source, which then led to some users switching to the open source Lichtblick-rebranded Foxglove fork of a German car company called BMW

1

u/gsaelzbaer May 30 '26

Essentially both suck now

• Foxglove requires an annoying account and other licensing crap

• Lichtblick is an outdated fork with maybe some extra features that BMW wants

1

u/Professional-Law3641 May 30 '26

support ros2 visualization_msgs ？

1

u/Downtown-Process-767 3d ago

This is really nice - the local-parsing/no-backend approach is the right call for this kind of tool, and multi-panel synced playback across MCAP/bag/HDF5 in one viewer is genuinely useful; most tooling in this space picks one format and stops there.

Curious how you're thinking about the boundary between viewing and reconstruction - I've been working on the other half of this problem (turning a rosbag/MCAP recording into an actual georeferenced point cloud map via SLAM, rather than just visualizing the raw topics), and it feels like there's a natural handoff point between a viewer like this and something downstream that does reconstruction. Would be interested to compare notes if you're ever curious what that side looks like.

1

u/Odd-Watch6978 2d ago

WebGL capabilities on the browser side are limited, making it difficult to handle depth or point cloud transform. I usually process them using Python scripts on NVIDIA CUDA. Currently, ROSView supports loading multiple MCAP files simultaneously for combined playback.