Determining appearance of points in point cloud based on normal vectors of points

A method relating to a point cloud includes defining a line of sight of a point cloud on a display of a computer, estimating a normal vector for at least one point of the plurality of points, and determining the appearance on the display of at least one point of the plurality of points based on the step of estimating a normal vector. One can use the computer to manipulate the point cloud to display a selected view of the scene and calculate the angle between the normal vector of the at least one point and a line of sight. The step of determining the appearance can include determining the transparency, color or size of the point on the display according to the angle between the normal vector and the line of sight.