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ADR-094: Live 3D Point Cloud Viewer — GitHub Pages Deployment with Optional Real-Data Stream

Field Value
Status Proposed (2026-04-29)
Date 2026-04-29
Authors ruv
Related ADR-092 (nvsim dashboard Pages deployment), ADR-059 (live ESP32 CSI pipeline), ADR-079 (camera ground-truth training)
Branch feat/pointcloud-pages-demo

1. Context

The wifi-densepose-pointcloud crate ships a Three.js-based viewer (v2/crates/wifi-densepose-pointcloud/src/viewer.html) that renders the fused camera-depth + WiFi CSI + mmWave point cloud produced by the ruview-pointcloud serve binary. Today the viewer is local-only:

  • It is served by the Axum binary on 127.0.0.1:9880.
  • It polls /api/splats every 500 ms expecting a backend on the same origin.
  • There is no GitHub Pages deployment, so the README's "▶ Live 3D Point Cloud" link points at the moved-content section in docs/readme-details.md, not at a hosted demo. The two sibling demos (Live Observatory, Dual-Modal Pose Fusion) are already hosted at https://ruvnet.github.io/RuView/ and …/pose-fusion.html.

This is an asymmetry: a first-time visitor can preview the WiFi pose demo and the Observatory in one click, but cannot preview the point cloud without cloning the repo, building Rust, plugging in an ESP32, and pointing a webcam at themselves. That gap suppresses the most visually compelling demonstration of the v0.7+ sensor-fusion work.

A naive fix — drop the static HTML at gh-pages/pointcloud/ — does not work because the viewer's fetch("/api/splats") will 404 on Pages and the canvas will hang at "Loading…". A second naive fix — bake in a fixed sample dataset — solves the loading state but loses the live-data story entirely, and forks the viewer into a "demo build" and a "real build" that drift apart.

2. Decision

Ship one viewer that auto-selects its transport from URL parameters, and publish it to gh-pages/pointcloud/ alongside the other demos:

  1. Default mode — when the viewer is opened with no query parameters on https://ruvnet.github.io/RuView/pointcloud/, present a "▶ Enable camera" CTA. On click the viewer requests webcam access, runs MediaPipe Face Mesh in-browser (~30 fps, 478 refined landmarks), and renders the visitor's own face as a point cloud — the closest browser equivalent of the local pipeline's depth-backprojected face geometry that motivated this ADR (I could see the outline of my face in points). The viewer mirrors x to match selfie convention and maps Face Mesh's relative-z to the same world-coordinate range the live /api/splats payload uses, so a single render path drives both. Badge reads ● DEMO Your Face (MediaPipe). If the user denies camera permission, dismisses the prompt, or visits on a device without a webcam, the viewer falls back automatically to a procedural scaffold (floor grid, walls, breathing figure, 17-keypoint skeleton). All processing is client-side; no frames leave the browser. ~480-500 splats from the face plus ~110 floor/wall context splats.
  2. Auto mode (?backend=auto) — fetch from /api/splats on the same origin. This is the local-development case (ruview-pointcloud serve serves the viewer and the API together). On any failure (404, network error, CORS), fall back silently to synthetic-demo rendering so the tab never dies.
  3. Remote mode (?backend=<url>) — fetch from <url>/api/splats. The user supplies a CORS-permitting host running their own ruview-pointcloud serve (e.g. a Tailscale-exposed home node). Badge reads ● REMOTE <url>. Same silent demo fallback on failure.
  4. Strict-live mode (?live=1) — disable the demo fallback. If the chosen transport fails, replace the info panel with an explicit offline message (● OFFLINE — Live backend required but unreachable). Useful for embedding the viewer in a status page or kiosk.

The synthetic frame returned by the in-browser generator matches the JSON shape of the live /api/splats payload exactly (splats, count, frame, live, pipeline.{skeleton,vitals,…}), so a single render path drives both modes. There is no demo build vs real build — only one HTML file, one render path, and one set of bugs.

A new GitHub Actions workflow (.github/workflows/pointcloud-pages.yml) copies the viewer to gh-pages/pointcloud/index.html on every push to main that touches the viewer, using peaceiris/actions-gh-pages@v4 with keep_files: true to preserve the existing observatory, pose-fusion, and nvsim deployments.

3. Consequences

Positive

  • First-click demo. Visitors clicking the README's "▶ Live 3D Point Cloud" link land on a working Three.js scene in <1 s, no toolchain required. Matches the parity of the other two demos.
  • Real-data on demand. Users with their own ruview-pointcloud serve host can use the same hosted viewer URL with ?backend=https://their-host.example.com — no clone, no rebuild. The hosted demo doubles as a thin client for self-hosted backends.
  • Single render path. Synthetic frames flow through the same handleData → updateSplats → drawSkeleton pipeline as live frames, so visual regressions surface in the demo and the live build at the same time. This is the same dual-transport pattern ADR-092 chose for nvsim.
  • No backend deploy required. Pages serves static HTML; the demo works without standing up an Axum host on the public internet, and there is no per-visitor CSI/camera plumbing to provision.
  • Preserves existing deployments. keep_files: true plus the pointcloud/ destination means observatory/, pose-fusion/, nvsim/, and the root index.html on gh-pages are untouched.

Negative / tradeoffs

  • Face mesh ≠ CSI. Browser webcam + MediaPipe gives real face geometry but does not produce CSI-derived pose. Visitors who want to see the WiFi-driven path still need ?backend=<their-host>. The procedural fallback is not WiFi-driven either; it is purely visual scaffolding. We accept this — the goal of the hosted demo is to convey the shape of what the local pipeline produces (a point cloud of the user) rather than reproduce the WiFi physics in the browser. The latter is a future ADR (WASM port of the fusion crate).
  • CORS burden on remote mode. Users who want to share their backend must add Access-Control-Allow-Origin: https://ruvnet.github.io (or *) to their ruview-pointcloud serve config. We document this in the workflow's generated README; we do not add a public proxy.
  • Synthetic generator lives in the viewer. ~80 LOC of procedural JS is now part of viewer.html. Acceptable: the file is already the client-side render bundle, and the generator is bounded and inert (deterministic, no I/O, no eval).
  • No replay-from-recording in this ADR. A future ADR may add a ?recording=<url>.jsonl mode that replays captured frames at native rate; that is out of scope here.

Neutral

  • The local-dev experience is unchanged. ruview-pointcloud serve still serves viewer.html from the bundled asset and the viewer still hits /api/splats because ?backend defaults to auto. Nothing in the Rust crate changes — this is HTML + workflow only.

4. Implementation

File Change
v2/crates/wifi-densepose-pointcloud/src/viewer.html Add URL-param transport selector (backend, live), synthetic frame generator, demo-fallback path, transport-aware mode badge. ~120 LOC added, no removed behavior.
.github/workflows/pointcloud-pages.yml New workflow: stage viewer to _site/pointcloud/index.html, deploy to gh-pages/pointcloud/ with keep_files: true. Triggers on viewer changes and on manual dispatch.
README.md Already updated — ▶ Live 3D Point Cloud link will be retargeted to https://ruvnet.github.io/RuView/pointcloud/ once the first deploy succeeds. (Tracked separately, not blocking this ADR.)
docs/adr/README.md ADR index — add ADR-094 row.

5. Acceptance Gates

This ADR is Implemented when all of the following hold:

  1. Pushing to main with a viewer change triggers pointcloud-pages.yml, which deploys to gh-pages/pointcloud/ in under 60 seconds.
  2. https://ruvnet.github.io/RuView/pointcloud/ loads, shows the "Enable camera" CTA, and on accept renders the visitor's face as a point cloud with badge ● DEMO Your Face (MediaPipe) and non-zero splat + frame counts. On camera denial, falls back to the procedural scene with badge ● DEMO Synthetic.
  3. Existing demos at https://ruvnet.github.io/RuView/ and …/pose-fusion.html and …/nvsim/ are still reachable after the first deploy (smoke-tested manually).
  4. https://ruvnet.github.io/RuView/pointcloud/?live=1 shows the ● OFFLINE panel (because no same-origin backend exists on Pages).
  5. https://ruvnet.github.io/RuView/pointcloud/?backend=https://example.invalid falls back to demo within one poll interval (~500 ms) without throwing in the console.
  6. Running ./target/release/ruview-pointcloud serve locally and opening http://127.0.0.1:9880/ (which serves the same HTML) still shows live-mode rendering with the ● LIVE Local Backend badge.

6. Out of Scope

  • Replaying recorded JSONL frames in the browser (future ADR).
  • WASM-side execution of the fusion pipeline in the browser (would require porting the camera + mmWave path; deferred).
  • Authentication / signed splats payloads — backend-side concern, unaffected by this client-side change.
  • Hosting a public CORS proxy for users without their own backend.