FugroViewer

FugroViewer is a free desktop application from Fugro, the Dutch geotechnical and survey company. It is used to inspect geospatial deliverables such as lidar point clouds, photogrammetric surfaces, IFSAR elevation data, rasters and vectors. Elevation and terrain models can be shown in ortho, 3D perspective and cross-section profile views. Point clouds can be filtered by classification, flight line, return number or source ID. TINs can be coloured by elevation or intensity, and imagery and vector layers can be draped over 3D data. Users can also generate contours, drop point-of-interest markers, draw area-of-interest polygons and export graphics for reports. The program reads LAS (including LAS 1.4 and waveform variants), LAZ, ASCII and 32-bit GeoTIFF files. According to Fugro, the current release, 3.7, can open files up to six times larger than earlier versions and draws data faster. FugroViewer suits survey clients, engineers, GIS staff and consultants who receive lidar or terrain data and need to look at it, take measurements and share images without buying a processing suite. It is also used in university lidar teaching material. There are no paid plans. Fugro offers the software as freeware through a download on its website, and one review notes that the licence has to be renewed periodically. It runs only on Windows and has no published API, plugins or integrations with asset or GIS platforms. Its main limitation is that it is a viewer. It does not do the automated classification, editing, feature extraction or large-project workflows found in commercial tools such as LP360, TerraScan or Global Mapper. Independent user reviews are also scarce.