Display portion of windows desktop on LabVIEW frontpanel

[Ebby2014]

Hi, 

I'm looking into doing something which is currently beyond my reach, so would like to know what others think and welcome any advice.

I've been looking at a 3rd party application (cloudcompare) which has lots of nice features that I would like to integrate into a LabVIEW application. Cloudcompare can be used to visualise and manipulate very large point cloud data sets. The user can use their mouse to zoom, pan, rotate etc the data, similar to the behavior of a LabVIEW 3d picture control.

What I would like to do, is to run cloudcompare out of the bounds of my desktop (i.e. render it off-screen) and cast just a section of its GUI on a LabVIEW frontpanel. I also wish to ensure any mouse events in the frontpanel make it back to cloudcompare. The target operating system is Win7.

I'm against the clock and this is just a nice to have feature, so the simpler the solution the better, but this strikes me as something which could be useful in a number of circumstances.

Thanks,

Tom

[Norbert_B]

If that 3rd party software provides a .NET interface, which enables "embedding", you can insert that into a .NET container on the LV frontpanel.

[Ebby2014]

Thankyou for the reply Norbert. The software doesn't provide a .NET interface however I've just found this by GriffinRU  using .NET, DirectShow library:

https://forums.ni.com/t5/Example-Program-Drafts/DirectShow-NET-LabVIEW-SDK-Video-Audio-IP-streams/ta...

I've tried it out and it works very nicely. The next step will be to pass the mouse events back to the correct area of the screen (or generate mouse events in that area) and I think that will be the complete solution.

Tom