[ros-users] PointClouds.org launch!

[Radu Bogdan Rusu]

Hi all,

The Point Cloud Library (PCL) moved today to its new home at PointClouds.org [*]. This marks an important step in PCL's 
development, which has been growing at a rapid rate in the past few months, trying to improve itself as a stable 3D 
point cloud processing library.

Since we're also celebrating one year of PCL: http://www.pointclouds.org/media.html


As we're getting ready for 1.0-RC, here's a few things we've been working on:
  * PCL features a complete Kinect (OpenNI) camera grabber, that allows users to get data directly in PCL and operate on it;
  * the library is completely standalone now, compiled using a simple cmake-like build system;
  * we're adding code snippets in doxygen to improve documentation;
  * all the tutorials are now generated from reST files in the repository;
  * lots of tiny bug fixes and improvements overall (more on this later).

For 1.0, we strive to have complete portability on Linux, MacOS, Windows, and Android (minus the visualization part).


Together with the new web site, we launch a collection of sister web sites, that will best serve our great development 
team and user base:
  * http://dev.pointclouds.org - will now serve as the main hub for development, with dedicated issue ticket tracking 
and repository management;
  * http://docs.pointclouds.org - contains the PCL API documentation (and more);
  * http://svn.pointclouds.org - our new SVN repository.


PCL is proudly supported by Willow Garage, NVidia, and Google Summer of Code 2011. For more information please check 
http://www.pointclouds.org/about.html.


PCL wouldn't have become what it is today without the help of many people. Due to space constraints, we cannot 
acknowledge all of them here, but we would like to especially thank all our contributors and developers who have worked 
so hard to make PCL more stable, more user friendly, and better documented. We hope that PCL will help you solve more 3D 
perception problems, and we look forward to your contributions!

On behalf of the PCL development team,
Radu.
-- 
http://pointclouds.org


[*] http://www.willowgarage.com/blog/2011/03/27/point-cloud-library-pcl-moved-pointcloudsorg