Aerospace, Defense, and Open Geospatial Technologies at the Cesium Developer Conference
Our third installment highlights two more tracks at the 2025 Cesium Developer Conference: community-contributed aerospace and defense topics and sessions on Cesium, iTwin, OGC 3D Tiles, and other open technologies compiled by the teams at Cesium and Bentley Systems who work on them.
With Cesium’s roots in aerospace and commitment to interoperability and rapid innovation for tackling the hardest problems in 3D geospatial, we were excited to receive a group of full and lightning talk submissions focused on space, the Moon, flight systems, and mission-critical visualization and analysis.
To provide the community with a closer look into the advancements happening with Cesium and 3D Tiles, we decided to group a set of talks from the Platform team in Bentley Systems. The Platform team comprises development teams from Cesium, iTwin, and iTwin Capture, bringing together global geospatial, cloud-based-BIM (building information modeling), and reality capture.
Calculating access to communications satellites in DigitalArsenal's OrbPro. Courtesy DigitalArsenal.
Aerospace and Defense
In today’s complex geopolitical environment, we’re seeing expanded interest in access to open geospatial technologies. Recent investments in the space industry have created satellite constellations with thousands of new spacecraft in just the last few years, and we’re hearing from developers who want to implement full global geospatial 3D experiences for training, planning, operations, and analysis.
These trends are reflected in the talk submissions we grouped in the Aerospace and Defense track, including:
- A presentation by Maxar on 3D Tiles and One World Terrain
- A photogrammetry sandbox built with Cesium for Unreal by the French Air Force
- A flight status indication system from Takram
- Military planning using agentic AI from our former colleague Brady Moore
- Astronaut training on the Moon with Buendea
The Aerospace and Defense sessions are in a track the morning of June 24, and a series of seven lightning talks will be featured during the afternoon of the 24th on the mainstage.
Maxar Precision3D Surface Model of Kabul International Airport. Courtesy Maxar Technologies.
Cesium, iTwin, and 3D Tiles
We want the community to take center stage, and we want to feature enough sessions that developers can get a taste of what is happening now that Cesium is part of Bentley Systems.
The track focusing on Cesium, iTwin, and 3D Tiles will feature sessions on topics such as:
- New capabilities in CesiumJS
- An update on Cesium ion
- Bringing AI analytical tools for reality capture data into Cesium ion
- Working with BIM data and the Design Tiler
- How Gaussian splats and 3D Tiles are coming together
- An exploration of new user interfaces combining geospatial and BIM data from the Bentley iLab team
The Cesium, iTwin, and 3D Tiles track will run through the morning of June 24 and into the morning of June 25.
You can find out more about what’s happening with Cesium and 3D Tiles in the pre-conference Cesium Deep Dive workshop and in mainstage presentations.
An iModel of a Philadelphia Metrostation on top of an iTwin Reality Mesh shown in CesiumJS.
Four more tracks to explore
There are six tracks with over 90 full sessions and lightning talks. We’ll be releasing more information about our fantastic mainstage presentations soon, including a closing session that will feature two reality capture stories featured in recent news!
Join us
The full agenda for the conference is live. Read more about this year’s tracks on the Cesium blog.
Our speakers are excited to meet up with industry colleagues, share learnings, and hear feedback. Register to attend and connect with the community in Philadelphia. We’ll see you there.