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Upcoming Cesium Talks in Boston

This week, we are hitting the road and heading to one of our favorite cities, Boston. We're visiting the graphics labs at MIT and Harvard, the Center for Geographic Analysis at Harvard, and our friends at Heuristic Labs.

We'll post slides for our talks when we are back in town. In the meantime, here are the abstracts.

Update: the slides are now up on the publications page.

Rendering Massive Geospatial Datasets in Cesium
Tuesday, November 18
MIT, Computer Graphics Group

Advances in data acquisition and open data policies have resulted in a plethora of massive geospatial datasets. Launching a constellation of imaging satellites is now in the reach of startups. OpenStreetMap has crowdsourced a global map and buildings for many cities. Governments are releasing high-resolution (30m+) terrain data. LiDAR sensors are becoming widely available. The result is massive georeferenced terrain, texture, 3D model, and point cloud datasets. In this talk, we discuss techniques for streaming these datasets and rendering them in a web browser based on our experience developing Cesium, an open-source WebGL-based JavaScript library for creating 3D globes. This talk includes plenty of demos with debug views.

Bringing 3D Geospatial to the Web with Cesium
Wednesday, November 19
Harvard, Center for Geographic Analysis

WebGL - basically OpenGL ES for JavaScript - is now available in all web browsers and on all platforms, including iOS. WebGL has given us the opportunity to bring geospatial visualization to the web without plugins. However, building an engine for massive geo-reference datasets and temporal data directly in WebGL is a large undertaking. This is where Cesium comes in. Cesium is an open-source JavaScript library for creating 3D globes and 2D maps based on WebGL. In this talk, we discuss Cesium's design and major features with live demos.