DroneDeploy Visualizes Construction Sites with Cesium

Siloed approaches to architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) can lead to poor communication and collaboration across all phases of projects, resulting in delays and increased costs. DroneDeploy enables stakeholders to examine the entire life cycle of a project with its drone software and viewer, which use 3D Tiles and Cesium ion Self-Hosted to make massive photogrammetry datasets manageable and accessible.

Founded in 2013, DroneDeploy has been using Cesium since 2018. With solutions for construction, agriculture, and insurance, DroneDeploy has built a platform for drone operators to host, visualize, and analyze their aerial imagery and photogrammetry, often on mobile devices. 3D comes into play for these users with accurate models and measurements of new schools or surveys for homeowners who are considering solar panels, for example. Teams can regularly refer to and update the models, examining change over time, making informed decisions, and staying on schedule.

The company has users in 180 countries, who have scanned 1.7 million jobsites, including 2D imagery and 3D models. It has the world’s largest drone data repository.

Operators run DroneDeploy’s software on their drones, capturing buildings and surroundings exactly as they are in the real world. This data is uploaded as aerial imagery or photogrammetry to DroneDeploy’s processing pipeline, which relies on Cesium’s 3D models tiler and point cloud tiler via Cesium ion Self-Hosted in their own environment, and is then available in DroneDeploy’s viewer for analysis and sharing.

Because users’ untiled models are multiple gigabytes, computers and networks might struggle with these massive datasets, especially phones or tablets. Using 3D Tiles means this data is optimized for streaming and designed for precision. 

“Customer datasets vary in size. For bigger datasets—like an entire construction site, multiple square kilometers—getting detail in an untiled model is nearly impossible. Tiling with Cesium allows us to get it in quickly and then refine while maintaining high quality and a high level of performance,” said Joseph Sullivan, DroneDeploy’s 3D engineering lead.

With Cesium’s 3D Tiling Pipeline, DroneDeploy puts its engineering resources into its custom viewer rather than model processing, and users get photorealistic 3D models for decisions based on reality.

To easily bring massive datasets to AEC stakeholders, sign up for a free Cesium ion account.