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Cesium FOSS4G NA Talk

Our talk on Cesium was accepted to the Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial North America 2013 conference, FOSS4G NA 2013. Here’s the abstract:

Cesium: 3D Maps on the Web

With WebGL, it is now possible to have hardware-accelerated 3D maps in a web browser without a plugin. In this talk, we present Cesium, an open-source JavaScript library for 3D web maps. In addition to being a standalone library, Cesium provides 3D for OpenLayers 3.

With live demos, we show Cesium's major geospatial features including high-resolution global-scale terrain, map layers, and vector data; support for open standards such as WMS, TMS, and KML; and smooth 3D camera control. In addition, we show Cesium's first-class support for temporal georeferenced data with CZML.

We also discuss our open-source development culture, our experience with github, and development tools for automated testing and optimizing deployment.

booth

Analytical Graphics, Inc., who many of us work for, is sponoring the conference and will have a booth showing Cesium.

Also, we’re helping the OpenLayers 3 developers integrate Cesium to bring 3D to OpenLayers. Tom Payne and Eric Lemoine from Camptocamp SA will talk about this and other OpenLayers 3 details in their talk:

OpenLayers 3: Under The Hood

OpenLayers 3 is the next generation of web mapping. A radical new architecture and the use of cutting edge JavaScript techniques, libraries, and tools enables a full suite of previously unimaginable functionality while maintaining a compact, high performance library.

In this talk we'll show you how to use this functionality in your applications, and peek under the hood to see how OpenLayers 3's architecture makes it possible. We'll include:

Virtual globe (Cesium) integration: a carefully designed camera and data source abstractions permit close integration with the virtual globes. Switch between 2D and 3D views of the same data, or display synchronized 2D and 3D views side by side.

Multiple rendering back-ends: a pluggable rendering architecture supports multiple renderers for maximum performance and portability. A Canvas 2D renderer provides fast, reliable rendering on current devices, a DOM renderer provides fall-back capabilities for older browsers, and a WebGL renderer opens the door to the next generation of performance for the most demanding applications.

Rich data sources: generic and powerful core data representations of tiled, single image, and vector data make it easy to add support for a wide range of geospatial data sources.

Smooth and flexible interaction and animation: an optimized rendering path ensures that interaction remains smooth at all times.

Compact library size: use of the Closure suite of tools creates keeps the build size small while keeping the source code readable.

ol3