Will Potree Desktop work on an a new M1 MacBook?

[TheBiggestNumber]

I would like to do point cloud conversion in the field. I was wondering if getting an ARM / M1 Mac is an option for using Potree desktop, mainly for battery life. Many thanks for Potree and all the great tools!

[sdoughtie]

Unfortunately, Potree desktop seems to be windows only. Metashape can import points and export them to potree. There is a Mac version. However, I don't know of a free solution other than to virtualize windows and run the Potreeconverted.

[sdoughtie]

I wasn't thinking, is there a way to virtualize windows on a M1 Mac? I don't think there is yet.

[TheBiggestNumber]

I believe the ARM based M1 macs can only virtualize ARM Windows, whereas Potree Desktop is X64. As for Metashape, it forces the calculation of point normals every time you import a point cloud, which adds a huge amount of processing time and battery drain, defeating the purpose of added mobility. I guess Windows wins. Though you could control a remote desktop, or use a virtual machine from Microsoft Azure, or Amazon Workspaces.

[sdoughtie]

Only problem is getting the dataset up to the cloud on mobile.

[sdoughtie]

This looks interesting. Microsoft to the rescue. Apparently, Microsoft is working on a x64 emulator for Windows on Arm.

x64 Emulator

[raycaster08]

The main reason it won't work on m1 is that it won't run PotreeConverter.exe on windows platform.
I added a PotreeConverter compiled for the mac m1 platform to the repo and it ran successfully

$ git clone https://github.com/yurui01/PotreeDesktop.git
$ cd PotreeDesktop
$ npm install
$ electron .