Thanks for everything, NASA WorldWind
The WorldWind shutdown is an unfortunate event for the geospatial community. WorldWind has clearly been impactful and a valuable resource in providing public 3D data and promoting open source and open data in the geospatial community.
Since we heard the news, we’ve been thinking about ways Cesium can help and find the best way to support users of WorldWind. For users looking to migrate their applications to virtual globe engines with terrain and imagery datasets, Cesium offers 3D data, including our high resolution Cesium World Terrain, Bing Maps Imagery, and Sentinel-2 imagery that can serve as an alternative. Here’s a quick look at those data sets, which are comparable or higher resolution than what was provided by WorldWind.
Bing Imagery and Cesium World Terrain loaded in CesiumJS.
Terrain shading based on slope for situational awareness.
The data mentioned above is offered via our cloud platform Cesium ion. For WorldWind users trying out Cesium this month, we’re offering the first three months of Cesium ion free for any plan! Reach out to Tim after signing up to get this enabled for your account.
If you’re learning about Cesium for the first time, our platform enables data providers and developers to build 3D geospatial applications. With our tools you can upload your 3D geospatial data and visualize it online in CesiumJS, access our curated 3D content and fuse it with your own, and then stream it all out to any device. We also have analytics tools you can use with your data to take measurements, see viewsheds and more. Cesium ion is our cloud-hosted platform, and all our tools are available on-premises too.
BIM model with photogrammetry scene, courtesy of Bentley Systems.
Some of the core parts of Cesium’s visualization engine and WorldWind, such as the geometry library, share similarities and have feature parity, which we hope will make the transition easier. We look forward to collaborating with the WorldWind community to determine how we can best support you.
If you have any questions about moving to Cesium, we’d love to hear from you!