Opening a site drops you into the 3D scene, with a panel switcher down the left and the viewer's own tools around the canvas.

Site View. Panel tabs run across the top-left — Captures, Align, qPole, qSurvey, Settings. The scene fills the rest, with a tool rail down its left edge, a view cube top-right, and a 2D map inset bottom-left.

The five panels

Rather than separate pages, one site page swaps what's in the left panel. The scene stays loaded as you move between them.

Downloads start from these panels too — see Downloading your data.

How a site opens

Every site opens the same way, so the first thing on screen is always familiar: earth-centred navigation, perspective projection, camera positions off, the capture panel open on the left, and the images panel closed on the right. If someone hands you a link, that's the state they'll be describing.

The Captures panel

The Captures panel: search, filters by date, user and device, a capture count, and per-capture visibility and status. Prepare Downloads sits at the bottom.

Per capture you get a visibility toggle and a status indicator. Turn several on at once to see how captures fit together, or isolate one to work it.

Above the list, four ways to cut a long capture list down:

A toggle beside the search box swaps the list for a table view carrying more detail per capture. Capture names are truncated in the narrow list — hover any row to see the full name in a tooltip.

Selecting captures

Clicking a capture's name selects it, which is separate from the eye icon — the eye only controls whether a capture is loaded, and stays disabled until the capture finishes processing. Selection is what downloads work from; see Downloading your data.

The information button at the top of the panel opens the site's coordinate system — the fastest way to check what coordinate system the site is in before you measure anything. The panel itself minimizes for a full-screen scene, and can be dragged wider.

Navigating the scene

Two navigation models, and you can switch freely:

•       Earth-centred (the default) keeps the world the right way up as you move.

•       Orbit turns the scene around a point you choose — better for working one structure.

Independently of that, switch between perspective and orthographic; orthographic locks you into a true top-down view, which is what you want for anything plan-like. Double-click anywhere in the cloud to zoom to that spot and orbit around it — the quickest way to get from a whole site to one pole.

The view cube at the top right resets orientation to front, back, left, right, top or bottom. When you're lost, that's the way out.

Panoramas and photos

The images panel lives on the right edge and holds two kinds of imagery. In panos mode, pano positions are drawn into the scene as coloured markers; click one to open that panorama. Switch to photos and the pano markers disappear, because they no longer apply — switch back and they return. You can also toggle the markers on and off without leaving panos mode.

Double-click the point cloud to open the nearest photo in the photo viewer. The + button opens a second viewer, so you can hold two panoramas or two photos side by side and tab between them — useful for comparing the same asset from two passes.

A viewer can be minimiszed, closed, reopened, undocked and dragged anywhere on screen, then snapped back to the right-hand side.

Measuring

Five tools down the left rail, each with its own reset:

Measurements can currently only be made on the point cloud in the 3D viewport. A units control switches the whole scene between imperial and metric at any point, including after you've measured — so you don't have to decide up front.

Isolating part of the cloud

Clipping box — place it and everything outside is hidden immediately. Resize it with the handles or the plus and minus buttons, and reset when you're done.

Cross-section — pick the tool, left-click once for the start and again for the end, and a section drops into the view. Plus and minus thicken or thin it in increments of 0.2 in the site's units.

How the point cloud is drawn

Display settings sit further down the rail and change nothing about the data — only how you see it.

•       Adaptive sizing is the default; turn it off to set point size by hand.

•       Point outline can be toggled, with control over thickness and range — it makes edges read much better on sparse data.

•       Brightness, contrast and gamma for washed-out or dark captures.

Three colouring modes:

Two more toggles sit alongside: pano positions on or off, and a satellite basemap that lays imagery tiles underneath the 3D cloud for context.

The 2D map

Bottom-left, and more capable than it first looks. It opens at a default size and can be enlarged, minimized, closed, and reopened from its icon.

•       Layers — streets, satellite, hybrid or terrain.

•       Orthomosaic — load the site's ortho and toggle it on and off.

•       Pano positions — toggle independently of the 3D scene.

•       Recentre, plus and minus zoom, and a north arrow that squares the map up again after you've rotated away.