If you are working with laser scans and lidar data, the chances are you have bumped into e57-files, which are often used for point clouds.
Finding a good tool for opening the e57-files can be a challenge, since many of the solutions are proprietary and quite expensive.
Luckily, there is an open source tool that can import many different data formats, including e57-files. It’s called Meshlab and it has builds for Windows, Mac and Linux. The ability to open e57-files was added to the program quite recently, but it works well.
Check out Meshlab here: