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SIGGRAPH 2015 Trip Report

AGI's entire Cesium team had the joy of attending SIGGRAPH, the annual computer graphics conference.

Our trip kicked off with a night out with many members of the WebGL Community, including folks from Three.js, Sketchfab, Autodesk, NVIDIA, Google, and Khronos. We owe a huge thanks to Eric Haines for co-organizing this.

Follow all these awesome people on Twitter.

For the third year in a row, we had a Cesium presentation in the Carto BOF organized by Theresa-Marie Rhyne. Every year, the Carto BOF attendance keeps growing!

Tom Fili gave a great overview of Cesium and a sneak peak of 3D Tiles! The major themes were outstanding growth of the Cesium Community, the migration from Google Earth to Cesium, and 3D Tiles. Check out the slides.

We also organized the third annual Cesium BOF with presentations from AGIMousebird Consulting, and NICTA. Check out the slides.

We also organized the third annual Cesium BOF with presentations from AGIMousebird Consulting, and NICTA. Check out the slides.

Hannah Pinkos on community demos.

Kevin Ring on Cesium at NICTA.

@CesiumFili with giveaways.

We topped off the Cesium BOF with lunch.

This SIGGRAPH also brought the publication of another book we contributed to. In 2011, we celebrated the release of 3D Engine Design for Virtual Globes, in 2012, we celebrated OpenGL Insights, and this SIGGRAPH we celebrated WebGL Insights.

The book signing was packed with WebGL Insights authors contributors, including Cesium team members Matt Amato, Kevin Ring, and me.


Thanks to Mauricio Vives for this and many other great photos!

Matt Amato and Kevin Ring celebrating their chapter, Getting Serious with JavaScript.

Thanks to Ken Russell, @gfxprogrammer, for writing the foreword.

We were also happy to present at the WebGL BOF,theWebGL event of the year! Tony Parisi (@auradeluxe), Kai Ninomiya (@kainino0x), and I presented the latest glTF news, including Kai's awesome upcoming mesh compression work. Check out the slides. The interest in glTF is overwhelming!

Thanks to Brandon Jones, @Tojiro, for snapping the WebGL BOF pictures.

In addition to Cesium's existing glTF support, the Three.js glTF loader is being updated, and BabylonJS is adding glTF support!

During all the Khronos BOFs and the Khronos party, the Cesium team had a table to show off our latest work with WebGL and glTF.

Hannah Pinkos showing our Cesium demo of over 1.1 million OpenStreetMap buildings in New York City.

Shan Malhotra and crew at NASA JPL are building amazing apps with Cesium such as Vesta Trek and Mars Trek. They kindly invited us to visit NASA JPL while we were at SIGGRAPH.

NASA JPL.


Replica of the Mars Rover, Spirit.

The Galileo satellite.

NASA JPL Mission Control Center.

During SIGGRAPH, we also announced 3D Tiles, which received a ton of positive feedback!