New in Diamondback: this package was moved from visualization_common to common_msgs.
A useful overview of visualization_msgs/Marker types can be found at rviz/DisplayTypes/Marker.
An introduction to the InteractiveMarker messages is given in the interactive marker tutorial at rviz/Tutorials/Interactive Markers: Getting Started.
Newly proposed, mistyped, or obsolete package. Could not find package "visualization_msgs" in rosdoc: /var/www/docs.ros.org/en/api/visualization_msgs/manifest.yaml
Interactive Marker messages
There are 6 interactive marker message types:
visualization_msgs/InteractiveMarkerUpdate is the top-level message for sending data from the interactive marker server to the client (i.e. rviz). The update message has an array of visualization_msgs/InteractiveMarker messages which are new or which need to be updated. It also has an array of visualization_msgs/InteractiveMarkerPose messages for sending only pose updates to existing interactive markers.
Each visualization_msgs/InteractiveMarker message has an array of visualization_msgs/InteractiveMarkerControls which describe its subcomponents. Each visualization_msgs/InteractiveMarkerControl has an array of visualization_msgs/Markers which together describe the shape of the control.
The visualization_msgs/InteractiveMarker message also has an array of visualization_msgs/MenuEntrys which together define a context menu which should appear when the appropriate action happens in the client (like a right-click). Although the entries are sent in a flat array, each one contains an id and a parent_id to specify a tree structure. This is described in visualization_msgs/MenuEntry.