Well, I am also working with LIDAR data, both terrestrial and aerial one.
I was also expecting at some point to be able to load point cloud data inside the engine so that my fellow researchers can look around the dataset with the Oculus/Vive. This way, people could have a better understanding of the data scale, quality and hopefully be more effective with classification.
Not only the PCL library would allow us to grab LIDAR data more easily inside the engine, it also comes with specific perks related to pcl visualization such as real time octree decimation (not the right term but you get the idea). I have a potree example here : http://vritage.nazg.org/Besancon/Besancon.html You will never have more than 1 000 000 points at a time depending on your “location” inside or outside the cloud, which comes pretty handy to spare processing power.
It seems that it’s possible to have this kind of behavior directly inside the engine as MrBushido pointed out on reddit at some point : https://www.reddit.com/r/unrealengine/comments/3bhak3/help_trying_to_implement_lidar_point_cloud/csm9rl2
Right now I’m still writing a matlab script to transform my lidar data into a 16bits png !