Hi,

> We recently addressed the surfels discussions internally, and couldn't
> come up to a conclusion on whether they make sense for processing or
> not. While they are certainly useful for rendering (they were developed
> for that purpose in Computer Graphics), we're not sure if they would
> complement or heavily intersect with the other primitives that we've
> been using. We already have points with normals and support size and
> other features, and we've been using them for years, except they are
> called differently.

What do you mean by "support size"? Do you refer to per-point radius? 
(such as PCL::PointWithRange?)

> As far as PointCloud2 support goes, diamondback is locked and we cannot
> make any changes. For RViz again, I'm not sure exactly what they would
> bring new... I guess the visualization would be a bit prettier and you
> would have non-uniform point sizes? :)

If I understood correctly, PointCloud2 is fairly agnostic to the content 
of the points, right? So the question lies more at the levels of PCL 
mapping and RViz display, isn't it?

I will discuss the other points on PCL-user.

Have a nice day,

Stéphane

-- 
Dr Stéphane Magnenat
http://stephane.magnenat.net