Send partial updates over time

Rerun allows you to log only the data that has changed in-between frames (or whatever atomic unit your timeline is using), i.e. you can think of this as a sort of diffs or delta encodings.

This is a natural consequence of how Rerun ingests, stores and finally queries data: Rerun always operates that way, whether you're aware of it or not. Consider this simple snippet:

snippet: archetypes/points3d_simple

Here, only the positions of the points have been specified but, looking at the complete definition for Points3D, we can see that it has quite a few more components available:

Required: Position3D

Recommended & Optional: Radius, Color, Text, ShowLabels, ClassId, KeypointId

All three languages for which we provide logging SDKs (Python, Rust, C++) expose APIs that allow fine-grained control over which components of an archetypes, when, and how.

The best way to learn about these APIs is to see them in action: check out the examples below.

Examples

Update specific properties of a point cloud over time

snippet: archetypes/points3d_partial_updates

<picture data-inline-viewer="snippets/archetypes/points3d_partial_updates"> <source media="(max-width: 480px)" srcset="https://static.rerun.io/points3d_partial_updates/d8bec9c3388d2bd0fe59dff01ab8cde0bdda135e/480w.png"> <source media="(max-width: 768px)" srcset="https://static.rerun.io/points3d_partial_updates/d8bec9c3388d2bd0fe59dff01ab8cde0bdda135e/768w.png"> <source media="(max-width: 1024px)" srcset="https://static.rerun.io/points3d_partial_updates/d8bec9c3388d2bd0fe59dff01ab8cde0bdda135e/1024w.png"> <source media="(max-width: 1200px)" srcset="https://static.rerun.io/points3d_partial_updates/d8bec9c3388d2bd0fe59dff01ab8cde0bdda135e/1200w.png"> </picture>

Update specific properties of a transform over time

snippet: archetypes/transform3d_partial_updates

<picture data-inline-viewer="snippets/archetypes/transform3d_partial_updates"> <source media="(max-width: 480px)" srcset="https://static.rerun.io/transform3d_partial_updates/11815bebc69ae400847896372b496cdd3e9b19fb/480w.png"> <source media="(max-width: 768px)" srcset="https://static.rerun.io/transform3d_partial_updates/11815bebc69ae400847896372b496cdd3e9b19fb/768w.png"> <source media="(max-width: 1024px)" srcset="https://static.rerun.io/transform3d_partial_updates/11815bebc69ae400847896372b496cdd3e9b19fb/1024w.png"> <source media="(max-width: 1200px)" srcset="https://static.rerun.io/transform3d_partial_updates/11815bebc69ae400847896372b496cdd3e9b19fb/1200w.png"> </picture>

Update specific parts of a 3D mesh over time

snippet: archetypes/mesh3d_partial_updates

<picture data-inline-viewer="snippets/archetypes/mesh3d_partial_updates"> <source media="(max-width: 480px)" srcset="https://static.rerun.io/mesh3d_partial_updates/79b8a83294ef2c1eb7f9ae7dea7267a17da464ae/480w.png"> <source media="(max-width: 768px)" srcset="https://static.rerun.io/mesh3d_partial_updates/79b8a83294ef2c1eb7f9ae7dea7267a17da464ae/768w.png"> <source media="(max-width: 1024px)" srcset="https://static.rerun.io/mesh3d_partial_updates/79b8a83294ef2c1eb7f9ae7dea7267a17da464ae/1024w.png"> <source media="(max-width: 1200px)" srcset="https://static.rerun.io/mesh3d_partial_updates/79b8a83294ef2c1eb7f9ae7dea7267a17da464ae/1200w.png"> </picture>