Helios

HELIOS - the Heidelberg LiDAR Operations Simulator - is a software package for interactive real-time simulation and visualisation of terrestrial, mobile and airborne laser scan surveys written in Java.

From GIScience·Updated June 17, 2026·View on GitHub·

·Archived

HELIOS has been deprecated as of 01/2021. For any new projects, please use *HELIOS++*, available [here](https://github.com/3dgeo-heidelberg/helios). For ongoing projects, please consider migrating to HELIOS++. The project is written primarily in Java, distributed under the GNU General Public License v3.0 license, first published in 2016. Key topics include: 3d, gis, interactive-visualizations, java, jmonkeyengine.

Latest release: final— Precompiled version of deprecated java implementation

January 22, 2021View Changelog →

HELIOS

Heidelberg LiDAR Operations Simulator (HELIOS)

HELIOS has been deprecated as of 01/2021. For any new projects, please use HELIOS++, available here. For ongoing projects, please consider migrating to HELIOS++.

HELIOS++

HELIOS++ is implemented in C++, a lot faster and more memory efficient than HELIOS, and also comes with new features, including Python support.

For compatibility and reproduction purposes, we still supply a precompiled version of HELIOS here, see https://github.com/GIScience/helios/releases/tag/final.