Bringing Earth to the Treadmill with Cesium
Lu Zhang is perhaps not the only person who sometimes finds running on a treadmill monotonous. During a recent workout he thought how much nicer it would be to run through some of the neighborhoods he used to live in. Since a quick flight to Paris or Shanghai for a run wasn’t realistic, he asked an AI chatbot a simple question: was it possible to recreate real-world neighborhoods in an immersive environment? That was the first time he’d heard of Cesium.
With EarthRunner, Lu is able to take his treadmill runs to cities all over the world. Courtesy Lu Zhang.
As a neuroscientist, Lu has studied spatial navigation—how the brain combines self-motion with external landmarks to represent and move through the world. With AI tools as a learning and prototyping partner, he brought that neuroscience background into geospatial technology and created EarthRunner.
The Parthenon in Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles. With Cesium for Unreal, runners can explore revisit familiar places or explore new areas. Courtesy Lu Zhang.
EarthRunner lets users run through a full-scale 3D world of real places, built with Cesium for Unreal streaming Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles. Locomotion is controlled by the treadmill, and an accompanying iPad interface, created with Python, handles navigation.
A chance to run in familiar cities made workouts more engaging. Lu further enhanced the experience with an AI-powered audio guide that highlights points of interest, making it easy to get to know new places. While EarthRunner remains a personal project, Lu sees possibilities far beyond his own workouts.
An AI-powered audio guide highlights points of interest. Courtesy Lu Zhang.
“AI gave me the confidence to try something completely new with Cesium for Unreal. Seeing the world appear almost exactly as I remembered it from my travels was completely amazing. And when I moved beyond experimenting, the Cesium documentation made it much easier to really understand the platform. After that, it felt like a whole new world opening up.”
– Lu Zhang, Creator EarthRunner
Lu may not have known about Cesium before he began this project, but it enabled him to take an idea sparked during a workout into an application that surpassed his original goals. Lu is now a Cesium Certified Developer, a testament to how accessible 3D geospatial development can be with the right resources. If you’re new to Cesium for Unreal, check out our tutorials to get started building your own custom application with global 3D datasets.