The 3D scene interface

The 3D SCENE tab on your machine’s page in the Viam app is where you inspect the 3D scene. This page is a reference to its panels, toolbar, navigation, and settings. For what the scene renders and where each element comes from, see Visualizing with the 3D scene.

Interface

The tab has four areas, each doing a distinct job: the viewport renders the scene; the World panel and Details panel select and inspect entities; the toolbars set the mode, open panels, and act on the scene.

3D viewport (center): the interactive rendering area. Orbit, pan, and zoom to see your frame system from any angle. Components appear as labeled coordinate axes; attached geometries render as translucent shapes; point clouds render as colored point sets. An XY grid provides spatial reference.

World panel (floating, upper-left): A hierarchical list of every entity in the scene, titled World. The panel is always visible (it has no close button) but is draggable and resizable. The root node World mirrors your machine’s world frame. Each row shows an expand caret, the entity name, and an eye toggle. Click the eye or select the row and press H to hide or show the entity. Click a row to select the entity; its details appear in the Details panel.

Details panel (floating, upper-right): Shows the selected entity’s spatial properties. The panel is draggable and anchors to the top-right of the viewport by default. It includes:

• world position (mm) and world orientation (an orientation vector: x / y / z unit-vector components, th in degrees): the entity’s absolute pose in the world frame. Read-only.
• parent frame: which frame this entity is a child of. Editable in build mode when the entity is a configurable frame.
• local position (mm) and local orientation: pose relative to the parent frame, corresponding to the translation and orientation in your frame configuration. Orientation has an OV (deg) tab and a Euler tab. Editable in build mode for configurable frames.
• geometry: a tab per geometry type (None / Box / Sphere / Capsule) plus dimensions (x / y / z for Box, r / l for Capsule, r for Sphere, all in mm). Editable in build mode.
• color, opacity, and show axes helper: how the entity draws in the viewport. These affect the rendering only, not the configuration.

The panel header includes a Zoom to object button (centers the camera on the selected entity), a View from this frame button (camera icon) that opens a frame POV widget, and a copy-to-clipboard button next to the Details heading that exports the entity’s pose and geometry as JSON. Entities that can be removed (for example, dropped PCD files) also show a Remove from scene button in the header.

Mode toggle (top-right): three buttons that set what the scene is for. Monitor (eye icon) watches live machine data and makes every field read-only. Build (hammer icon) is the editing mode: it pauses live updates and unlocks the Details panel and the Add frames button. Move (move icon) commands the machine to move a selected frame through the motion service. The tab opens in monitor mode and remembers the mode you last used.

Next to the mode toggle, in the same top-right strip:

• Fullscreen: expands the scene to fill the browser window.
• Settings (gear icon): opens the Settings panel.
• Control widgets (joystick icon): opens a panel listing the machine’s resources, where you turn on interactive controls for them. See 3D scene widgets.

Dashboard toolbar (top-center): tools that act on the scene. Which buttons appear depends on the mode and on your permissions. In every mode:

• Measurement (ruler icon): activate to measure distance between two points you pick in the viewport. Click the icon again to clear.
• Measurement settings (sliders icon next to the ruler): toggle x, y, or z under Enabled axes to constrain the second point to the enabled axes of the first.
• Focus selection: centers the view on the selected entity.

Monitor mode adds the Motion Plan Replayer (play icon), which imports plans the motion service dumped and steps through their trajectories. See Visualize a motion plan.

Build mode adds the editing tools: transform controls (Translate, Rotate, Scale, or none), Snapping with its settings, a Local space / World space toggle, AI Scene Builder, and:

• Add frames (axis-arrow icon): opens a floating panel listing components that do not yet have a frame; click a component and then Add frame (singular) to attach a default frame to it. See Editing frames visually.

Camera controls (bottom-right): Reset camera returns the view to its starting pose, and the Orthographic / Perspective toggle switches between an orthographic view (no foreshortening) and a perspective view. Keyboard: C.

Navigation controls

Holding ⌘ (or Ctrl) disables keyboard navigation, which is useful when you are editing a value in the Details panel. H only affects the currently selected or focused entity, so click an entity (or its row in the World panel) before pressing it.

Settings

Settings are grouped by what they affect: connection, scene decoration, point clouds, vision, and a few utility tabs. Click the gear icon to open the panel.

• Connection: polling rates for the scene’s data streams.
• Scene: toggle the grid, Object labels, hover detail tooltips, arm-model rendering (Arm Models), and line thickness.
• Pointclouds: set default point size and color, and enable or disable point cloud display per camera under Enabled cameras.
• Vision: enable or disable vision-service point-cloud entities.
• Debug: toggle Render stats, an on-screen performance counter.
• Weblabs: feature-flag overrides (usually empty).
• AR: settings for the immersive WebXR view.

Widgets have no settings tab: you turn them on from the Control widgets panel in the top-right strip. See 3D scene widgets.

File import

You can drag and drop .pcd, .ply, or .json (scene snapshot) files directly onto the 3D viewport to load external data into the scene. This is useful for loading saved SLAM maps or point cloud captures for comparison with your live frame system.

Link related entities (HoverLink)

HoverLink links two indexable entities so that hovering an item in one highlights the matching item in the other. When you select a point cloud or arrows entity (typically dropped PCD or PLY files), the Details panel shows an Add Relationship button to set this up.

To add a HoverLink:

1. Select a point cloud or arrows entity in the World panel.
2. In the Details panel, click Add Relationship.
3. Pick HoverLink as the relationship type.
4. Pick a second entity from the Entity dropdown.
5. Set an Index mapping formula. The default index maps point N in the source to point N in the target. Other expressions over index map between non-aligned datasets.
6. Click Add.

After the link is added, hovering a point in the source entity highlights the matching point in the target entity (and updates the hover tooltip with both points’ positions). Existing links appear under Relationships in the Details panel and have per-link remove buttons.

This is useful for comparing point clouds that should align (a registered scan against a transformed version, ground-truth points against predicted points) without flipping back and forth between separate views.