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Kevin Ring, TerriaJS founder, Joins the Cesium Development Team

Patrick Cozzi

We are thrilled to welcome CesiumJS veteran and my long-time friend, Kevin Ring, to Cesium to contribute broadly to our software development and 3D data curation.

Kevin has contributed significantly to CesiumJS since the early days, including developing the terrain and imagery engine, designing the quantized-mesh terrain format, helping create CZML, and … coming up with the name “Cesium”—an homage to the chemical element used in the atomic clock, inspired by our focus on accurate time-dynamic visualization, initially for aerospace.

Before Cesium, Kevin and I co-authored the book 3D Engine Design for Virtual Globes in 2011. Over the years, we’ve heard from readers from all corners of the 3D geospatial world and we are thrilled by our book’s impact to advance the field. Perhaps most importantly for Cesium, writing this book allowed us to cut our teeth on both old and new ideas for a 3D engine specifically designed for geospatial, which helped Cesium get off to a fast and smooth start.

While at CSIRO’s Data61, Kevin started TerriaJS, an open-source framework created originally for Australia’s NationalMap. It builds on CesiumJS and 3D Tiles to support discovery and exploration of a spatial data catalog, as well as spatial digital twins.

Kevin shared his enthusiasm for joining Cesium and creating the foundation for the future of 3D geospatial:

“Just about everyone I run into in the geospatial area in Australia has heard of Cesium, and most are on their way to adopting it. I’m confident the same is true elsewhere in the world. With TerriaJS in great hands at Data61, the time is right for me to move “lower in the stack” and help build out this fantastic core platform that everyone is building upon. I hope to leverage my expertise in Cesium’s underlying technology, along with my years of experience as a user of Cesium, to make CesiumJS, 3D Tiles, ion, and the entire Cesium platform even better.”

We are looking forward to Kevin’s engineering leadership accelerating the development of Cesium so you can fully utilize 3D geospatial data in your applications.