On Mon, Dec 6, 2010 at 12:27 PM, Radu Bogdan Rusu <rusu@willowgarage.com> wrote:
> Gonçalo,
>
> On 12/06/2010 10:18 AM, Ivan Dryanovski wrote:
>> 2010/12/6 Gonçalo Cabrita<goncabrita@gmail.com>:
>>> Hi everyone!
>>> I'm starting a project in which I am going to use a Point Cloud
>>> representation of data (not vision related).
>>> So my question is, should I use PointCloud2 instead of PointCloud? Is
>>> PointCloud sort of deprecated, or is it just a matter of choice depending on
>>> the requirements of my project?
> [...]
>> According to the PCL FAQ, publishing PointCloud2 is recommended over PointCloud:
>>
>> http://www.ros.org/wiki/pcl/FAQ#Is_there_any_reason_to_continue_using_PointCloud_messages.2BAC8-topics.3F
>
> As Ivan said, we are strongly discouraging the use of sensor_msgs/PointCloud for any important application where you
> care about efficiency. PCL (http://pointclouds.org :) ) is only supporting the new sensor_msgs/PointCloud2 format natively.
>
> Starting with the upcoming PCL 0.7 we're hoping to create drivers that will publish pcl::PointCloud<T> directly too -
> exciting times for those avid nodelet performance freaks! :)

Note that the C-turtle version of rviz does not support PointCloud2 natively.

The unstable version does.
-- 
 joq