MCAP

Background background

This example demonstrates how to visualize and work with MCAP files in Rerun. From mcap.dev:

MCAP (pronounced "em-cap") is an open source container file format for multimodal log data. It supports multiple channels of timestamped pre-serialized data, and is ideal for use in pub/sub or robotics applications.

MCAP is the default bag format in ROS 2 and is rapidly gaining adoption. You can read more about Rerun's MCAP support here.

In this guide, you will learn:

  1. How to load MCAP files directly into the Rerun viewer.
  2. How to convert MCAP files into native Rerun data files (RRD).
  3. How to convert older ROS bags (ROS 1 and ROS 2 SQLite3) into MCAP.
  4. How to read and deserialize MCAP/RRD data in Python for programmatic processing and advanced visualization in Rerun.

We will use a dataset from the JKK Research Center containing LiDAR, images, GPS, and IMU data. The workflow involves converting the original ROS 1 bag → MCAP → RRD, and then using Python to log the RRD data with specific Rerun components for optimal visualization.

Follow the tutorial and run the code follow-the-tutorial-and-run-the-code

This is an external example. Check the mcap_example repository for more information.