Cesium for Omniverse v0.25.0

Cesium for Unity Samples v1.17.0

CesiumJS 1.132

3D Tiles

At the 2025 Cesium Developer Conference, we were thrilled to demonstrate two powerful new Cesium ion capabilities now available to all users as a tech preview: reconstructing 3D reality models from photos and running AI-powered reality analysis. Both are essential toward Cesium’s mission to empower the community to build 3D geospatial experiences at the convergence of the built and natural environment.

With Cesium ion’s 3D modeling from photos, ion users can create 3D Tiles reality models, ready to stream to applications.

Introducing reality modeling in Cesium ion.

Reality Modeling in Cesium ion

Tens of thousands of users already upload reality data to Cesium ion, and for years they’ve asked us to make reality modeling tools available directly in ion. We’ve done it! With ion’s 3D modeling from photos, you can create 3D Tiles reality models, ready to stream to applications. The day after we demoed at the conference, users were already showing us 3D models they’d produced from photos with ion and told us how much this capability will streamline their workflows. 

Users frequently also request classification tools for their data in Cesium ion. Now, running Cesium ion’s curated analysis detectors against reality data, including previously uploaded reality data, produces a new point cloud segmented into the regions the detector is trained to identify, such as trees, railroad components, or buildings. This 3D Tiles point cloud can be styled to aid visualization or used by software for automated decision-making, providing actionable, real-world insights for city planning, environmental monitoring, transportation assessments, and other vital use cases.

A point cloud of Philadelphia’s Old City neighborhood after analysis with Cesium ion’s city detector. Source point cloud used for analysis provided by PASDA and combined with Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles.

A point cloud of a section of railroad after analysis with Cesium ion’s railroad detector. 

A point cloud of an office building and the surrounding area after analysis with Cesium ion’s city detector.

Prior to this reconstruction feature, Cesium ion users were able to upload 3D reality models generated from source photos with other software, as seen in the flow below. 

Uploading existing 3D reality data to Cesium ion. 

Of course, you can still import 3D models created outside Cesium ion, but with ion’s new reconstruction capabilities, you can now upload photos directly, and ion will generate the 3D models automatically—a more efficient and faster workflow. All photo uploads produce a 3D Tiles mesh. Optionally, you can also generate a 3D Tileset as a point cloud and Gaussian splats using the 3D Tiles draft extension. And of course, using Cesium ion, you can easily combine your 3D reality data with global 3D content like Cesium World Terrain or Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles, and with 3D design models, creating a unified view of the built and natural environment.

Uploading photos to Cesium ion using the new reality modeling feature. 

To bring you this state-of-the-art modeling quality, we integrated Cesium ion with technology from Bentley Systems iTwin Capture. Bringing this technology to the Cesium community is one of the key benefits of Cesium becoming part of Bentley, and we are excited to achieve this milestone release. iTwin Capture modeling technology is already used in production across the world, in applications such as mining, construction, and cell tower maintenance. For example, SMEC used iTwin Capture to create a digital twin of the N4 Montrose Interchange project in South Africa, saving money and time while protecting the sensitive surrounding environment. Our team is proud to make iTwin Capture technology available to Cesium’s broader ecosystem, where reality data is essential to domains as wide ranging as climate research, real estate development, flight simulation, sports broadcasting, and reality-based gaming. 

"Being able to generate photogrammetry, point clouds, and 3D Gaussian splats 3D Tiles from drone imagery input, stream them seamlessly to the web, and analyze the point clouds is a major milestone. This release brings end-to-end 3D reality modeling into one accessible, high-performance pipeline,” said Osarodion Victory Igbinobaro, co-founder and CEO of AERO AI. 

In future updates, look for modeling enhancements to help you tune how photo reconstruction is performed to produce exactly the results you need. We’re also considering the best way to make modeling available with Cesium ion Self-Hosted to enable these efficient workflows in your own environment. Share your thoughts with us on the community forum.

A 3D mesh tileset of a bridge reconstructed by Cesium ion from 141 photos. 

A point cloud tileset of a bridge reconstructed by Cesium ion from 141 photos. 

A Gaussian splats tileset using 3D Tiles draft extension of a bridge reconstructed by Cesium ion from 141 photos.

The Bentley technology that provides us with modeling services also includes AI-powered reality analysis to identify objects, regions of interest, and defects in reality data. With this first step to integrate reality analysis into Cesium ion, you can apply 3D segmentation to point clouds to produce a new, segmented 3D Tiles point cloud with embedded metadata. The metadata allows for runtime querying, styling, and filtering, like the styling seen in the Cesium Story below. The result is real-world insight into reality data, supporting data-driven decisions for urban planning, ecological monitoring, asset inventory, and more.

The 3D reality data analysis flow in Cesium ion.

In the coming year, we will bring more of Cesium ion’s reality analysis roadmap to you. This will include tools to build custom reality analysis detectors tuned for your data and the ability to extract features from reality data as supplemental vector data that can be used for overlays, annotations, and styling.

Applying 3D segmentation to 3D reality data to produce a new, segmented 3D Tiles point cloud with embedded metadata.

Cesium ion analysis of a point cloud of Old City Philadelphia 

Old City Philadelphia Analysis

Conference participants quickly dove into the new reality modeling and analysis capabilities, excitedly sharing progress with us between sessions and ultimately on the main stage. 

Try it yourself by following our Cesium ion modeling and analysis tutorials.

Osarodion Victory Igbinobaro of AERO AI (left) and Mary Moor of Rowan University (right) highlighted their experimentation with Cesium ion reality modeling at the Cesium Developer Conference. Have a project to share? Tag @Cesium when you share your projects on LinkedIn.

Introducing Reality Modeling and AI-Powered Analysis Services with Cesium ion

We are thrilled to announce that Bentley Systems’ iTwin Ventures has opened applications for the next cohort of iTwin Activate with the theme of “Advancing Infrastructure with Cesium and 3D Tiles.” 

iTwin Activate is Bentley’s accelerator for early-stage startups building open and commercial software for infrastructure. This iTwin Activate cohort will support game-changing software at the intersection of infrastructure and 3D geospatial ecosystem, building on Cesium and 3D Tiles.

We encourage early-stage startups in infrastructure and 3D geospatial software to apply. Over the four-month program, participants will: 

build a project incorporating Cesium and Open Geospatial Consortium community standard 3D Tiles with the support of technical experts;  

gain industry and market insights from product leaders; and  

receive development funding of up to $250,000 via a SAFE note to build their solutions.   

Cesium will support participants in creating rich geospatial applications that enable users to ingest geospatial data, design models, and reality captures. To empower participants, we’ll provide access to Bentley products, including iTwin Platform and iTwin Capture. This cohort will also be able to take advantage of the growing ecosystem of software that uses 3D Tiles.

The iTwin Activate program fosters collaboration between Bentley and early-stage startups in the infrastructure software industry. iTwin Activate helps startups build on Bentley’s digital twin platform technology, shares industry expertise, and supports participants’ efforts with funding from Bentley’s iTwin Ventures. The goal of the program is to accelerate a startup’s roadmap as they build a project incorporating Bentley technology. iTwin Activate complements the Cesium Ecosystem Grants program, which will continue to provide non-dilutive, unrestricted financial gifts that promote impactful contributions to 3D geospatial. 

Apply to iTwin Activate by Friday, July 25, 2025, to build the next generation of digital twins with Cesium and 3D Tiles.

Applications Now Open: iTwin Activate Cohort  Focusing on Cesium and 3D Tiles 

With the release of CesiumJS 1.130, users can drape imagery layers on 3D Tiles, allowing developers more freedom to combine geospatial data from different sources. Reality meshes, CAD/BIM data, and point clouds can be uploaded to Cesium ion and converted into 3D Tiles for efficient streaming and visualization. Now, imagery data like Bing Maps imagery or OpenStreetMap imagery can be layered on top, creating more powerful 3D geospatial applications. This addition addresses a long-standing community request and supports a wide range of use cases.

An example of draping imagery on 3D Tiles: Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles with Google Roadmap tiles overlay providing street and label data.

Use case 1: Orthophotography over reality meshes 

Existing reality mesh datasets can be augmented with high-quality, curated orthophotography imagery data. In this example, Bing Maps Aerial imagery is added to a 3D Tiles point cloud dataset without color data.

Use case 2: Sensor data layers over 3D Tiles 

The results of sensor coverage data, satellite imagery, or AI-based classification can be mapped on 3D Tiles to visualize the results of different analysis workflows. Here is an example where the user can select different imagery layers provided by NASA Earth Data, to overlay information like the biomass or population density over Photorealistic 3D Tiles.  

An example of draping imagery on 3D Tiles: Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles with information about the population density, provided by NASA Earth Data.

Use case 3: Adding contextual information over 3D Tiles 

Imagery can also be used as overlays to provide additional geospatial context about roads, buildings, or other points of interest. For example, imagery data that provides geospatial information can be draped over existing 3D Tiles datasets. 

An example of draping imagery on 3D Tiles: Bing Maps Labels draped over a tileset that was loaded from iTwin reality data.

This new feature is similar to the existing functionality of draping 3D Tiles on terrain data, so users can seamlessly leverage it with little effort. This simple example shows how to drape imagery data on 3D Tiles. The Cesium3DTileset class now offers a set of imagery layers, and these can be used exactly the same way as imagery layers for terrain in CesiumJS. This means adding the imagery to the to the tileset can be done with a single line of code: 

```js
tileset.imageryLayers.addImageryProvider( 

  await Cesium.createWorldImageryAsync({ 

    style: Cesium.IonWorldImageryStyle.AERIAL, 

  }) 

); 

The imagery layers that are added to a tileset are added as an ImageryLayer object. This object has several properties that affect the visual appearance of the imagery data as it is draped on the 3D Tiles data. Users can modify the alpha value (opacity), brightness, or saturation. This sandcastle showcases the ability to modify properties in real time. 

The first release of draping imagery over 3D Tiles that is part of CesiumJS 1.130 includes functionality that serves most use cases. There are several possible extensions or functionalities that can be added based on community input—for example, user controls to align existing imagery data with the 3D Tiles or to "upsample" the 3D Tiles geometry with imagery resolution that is higher than the geometry with large geographics extent. 

We welcome feedback about the draping functionality and thoughts about further use cases that should be supported via this community thread. 

Draping Imagery over 3D Tiles in CesiumJS 

It’s been just over nine months since Cesium joined Bentley Systems. We’ve used that time to learn more about the technologies built by Bentley and opportunities to bring them to the community. As we look forward to the first Cesium Developer Conference, we are sharing our roadmap to seek your guidance as we bring iTwin digital twin capabilities to Cesium. 

Our mission is to empower the community to build 3D geospatial experiences at the convergence of the built and natural environment. 3D Tiles has seen tremendous adoption, including by Google, Esri, Ansys, FOX Sports, The Weather Company, GE Aerospace, MathWorks, CAE, Trimble, and DroneDeploy, to name a few. Cesium ion receives more than 300 million monthly requests from over 30,000 monthly active users. Cesium’s runtime engines—CesiumJS, Cesium for Unreal, Cesium for Unity, and Cesium for Omniverse—continue to enable rapid development of new 3D geospatial applications by an ever-growing community as we continue to deeply invest in open source. There is bottomless demand for more curated data, high-performance tiling pipelines that support more inputs, tools for more efficient end-to-end workflows, and improved end-to-end performance. 

As part of Bentley, we have the opportunity to radically empower and expand the 3D geospatial community by leveraging best-in-class technology from Bentley to benefit all the broader ecosystem. Cesium has always been guided by community input, and we’d like your feedback on these themes on our roadmap: 

Integrate reality modeling and AI-powered analysis services with Cesium ion; 

Expose iTwin Platform APIs and services through Cesium; 

Introduce composable tiling pipelines to optimize your data as 3D Tiles; 

Advance Cesium runtime engines to capitalize on new 3D Tiles extensions and platform integrations; 

Provide reusable and configurable user experience tools and widgets; and 

Improve learning material and ongoing maintenance. 

3D Tiles is the core of the platform. It is the thread that weaves through the entire platform and community to be a cohesive end-to-end workflow, empowering developers to build extraordinary applications. We’re adding several capabilities to 3D Tiles that have been long requested by the community. 

Users across industries are capturing the environment at ever greater resolutions, more frequently, and with more types of devices. This exponential scaling creates opportunities to extend the 3D Tiles specification for more efficient storage, streaming, visualization, and analysis of 3D geospatial data that is spatially coherent and updated over time. 

Time-dynamic 3D Tiles is an extension that efficiently introduces the time dimension to 3D Tiles. Using time-dynamic tiles allows a single tileset to be updated over time, with each new capture updating only affected tiles. No longer will an entirely new tileset need to be created for each update; a single tileset can be updated incrementally, preserving a history of changes and allowing for more efficient and faster generation of updated tiles.  These can be used for analytical workflows, too, such as changeset analysis over time and comparing tilesets over time to design models. Visit the GitHub issue to share your input. 

Time-dynamic tiles allow a single tileset to be updated over time, with each new capture updating only affected tiles.

We’re also exploring connecting Bentley’s SYNCHRO 4D Schedule API to generate time-dynamic 3D tilesets. The SYNCHRO 4D Schedule API allows time-dynamic project data to be accessed and used over the web. This connection will converge time-dynamic geometry with business intelligence. 

Volumetric data has become an important way to visualize real-world content in numerous domains where continuous representation of data is required, such as geology, oceanography, and climate science. The 3D Tiles specification is intentionally flexible in supporting a variety of geometry types to best represent massive heterogenous data. By using voxels (volumetric elements) as a 3D payload with 3D Tiles, you will be able to build applications with global-scale volumetric data. We’re working on ellipsoidal, cuboid, and cylindrical voxels as a starting point in the 3D Tiles specification with glTF as the voxel payload. This will enable opportunities for volumetric data for subsurface, land, air, and space. Take a look at the draft Voxels extension. 

Water temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico represented using Voxels in CesiumJS.

One of the most popular topics recently in computer graphics is 3D Gaussian splats. High-resolution reality meshes and point clouds are fantastic for digitalizing our natural environment, but they fall short in capturing a few types of information, such as cables, trees, bars, telecom towers, etc. 3D Gaussian splats have proven to be a fantastic solution for preserving visual detail while maintaining very high fidelity. 

We are excited to add 3D Gaussian splats as a payload type in 3D Tiles, including adding the technology behind iTwin Capture to Cesium ion to enable modeling and tiling of 3D Gaussian splats. We’re collaborating with the glTF community and introducing a 3D Gaussian splat extension for glTF.  

Comparing 3D Gaussian splats using 3D Tiles (left) with Reality Meshes (right), with particular significance to the thin-and-long geometry such as wires, dishes, poles, and scaffolding.

Bentley Systems was an early adopter of 3D Tiles and has developed extensions to enhance the 3D visualization capabilities required for detailed infrastructure models. Cesium joining Bentley presents the opportunity to converge these extensions and runtime implementations to make them accessible to the entire community.  We are working on adding edges and wireframes, line rendering and materials (width, patterns, colors), customizable point sizes, billboards for annotations, and more. 

A 3D Tileset visualized in iTwin.js with glTF EXT_mesh_primitive_edge_visibility extension for highlighting edges.

Implicit surfaces enable representations of parametric shapes—like pipes, columns, beams, boxes, spheres, and cylinders—when used with other implicit surfaces for the creation of complex geometries that are hard to represent with triangle meshes. The benefits of this are in the storage and accuracy for analytics. Because the surfaces are not approximated as triangles meshes, the surfaces are rendered without geometric error. We are building on the glTF implicit shapes extension, introduced by Microsoft. 

The 3D Tiles specification supports rich metadata that adds properties and classifications to geometry. The metadata specification is written with the intent to add semantics at different granularities and for a variety of industries and use-cases. There is a need to define semantic vocabularies in the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry that also offer a taxonomy applicable to classes of objects. Capturing the meaning of these classes in a standard vocabulary enables downstream repurposing of this information in AI-driven data validation, data–interoperability, analytics, or interactivity. For example, downstream understanding that a class in a custom user-schema is modeling “doors” could be captured in terms of an applicable standard vocabulary—from IFC, Uniclass, or BIS—which other data consumers could operate on.  

The Base Infrastructure Schema (BIS) is a family of modular schemas that express taxonomy, data structure, and relationships for modeling federated data from infrastructure engineering. BIS schemas are organized into layers, most of them defining the rules and patterns considered as standard in the BIS ecosystem. The semantics embedded in standard BIS schemas have proven to be valuable in contexts beyond iModels.  

We’re working on a 3D Tiles extension for metadata semantics to cover classes, as well as ensuring encoding properly enables BIS and other similar semantic vocabularies.  

Integrate reality modeling and AI-powered analysis services with Cesium ion

One of the most exciting outcomes of Cesium joining Bentley is the opportunity to integrate reality modeling and AI-powered analysis services with Cesium ion. You have been vocal about wanting to be able to upload photos to generate 3D models, and we’re thrilled to be able to deliver on that by integrating the industry-leading technology used in iTwin Capture with Cesium ion. By using an integrated end-to-end pipeline from photos to 3D Tiles and from 3D Tiles to rendering and analytics, we aim to provide the best-in-class experience for using reality data in your 3D geospatial applications. With the advancements in 3D Gaussian splats, this will also support the pipeline to go from photos to 3D tilesets of splats. 

Adding Reality Modeling to Cesium ion enables users to create 3D Tiles from photos as input using the reality modeling technology used in iTwin Capture.

Reality analysis using AI feature detectors

Bentley has also built the technology to identify objects, regions of interest, or defects in reality data using AI. By integrating reality analysis into Cesium ion, we want to enable users to apply 3D segmentation and classification to reality. This analysis will be enabled in two forms: 

Embedded metadata in the 3D Tileset, allowing for runtime querying, styling, and filtering. 

Supplemental vector data as features extracted from the reality data, which can be used for overlays, annotations, and styling. 

We are adding vector data support in Cesium’s native plugins to enable all runtimes to use the results of the reality analysis. The result: real-world insights into reality data, supporting data-driven decisions. 

A 3D Tileset of a point cloud with embedded classification generated using AI-enabled reality analysis service.

For an initial release, we’ll enable analysis on reality meshes and point clouds, providing you with options through a growing list of curated analysis detectors. You will be able to analyze models already uploaded to ion, or generated with ion’s new reality modeling capabilities, creating an efficient, end-to-end workflow. The curated detectors include analysis for segmentation of trees, railway objects, and city elements, as well as others.  

In future releases, you can create your own custom detectors to run in ion. We are planning for 3D analysis of Gaussian splats, 2D segmentation of photo collections, and offering analysis in Cesium ion Self-Hosted.  

Expose iTwin Platform APIs and services through Cesium

iTwin Platform powers digital twin solutions that are used in AEC applications to design, build, and operate infrastructure around the world. By connecting iTwin and Cesium platforms, our goal is to provide a complete platform for digital twin experiences for the built and natural environment, with a strong commitment to open source, open standards, and open APIs. 

Exposing iTwin Platform APIs and services through Cesium channels will enable you to leverage capabilities like clash detection for design reviews; change elements to monitor design updates; perform analysis, such as carbon calculations; and apply AI-powered federated search to search and filter across 3D objects, engineering information, and business documents. Using iTwin Platform’s synchronization services, you will be able to bring in many more inputs for design models, which can then be added to Cesium apps as 3D Tiles. 

Clash detection and review shown in iTwin.js. 

Introduce composable tiling pipelines to optimize your data as 3D Tiles

Tiling pipelines to create 3D Tiles enable you to bring your own data into your 3D geospatial applications, a core requirement for most use cases. Over the years, Cesium has developed and introduced many tiling pipelines for different types of data: reality data, point clouds, design models, 3D buildings, terrain, imagery, and more. All of these tiling pipelines have their technological merits, but they are siloed based on the type of input data. Adding Bentley’s tiling pipelines for reality data and AEC design models results in even more tiling and optimization algorithms—that are also siloed. 

The vision for composable tiling pipelines is to have a unified, modularized, plugin-based pipeline that allows users to configure the stages for data conversion, tiling, and optimization. Example stages can include input file format conversions, coordinate system operations, mesh decimation, texture simplification, choice of tiling schemes, texture atlasing, mesh and texture compression, metadata processing, incremental updates, 3D Tiles-to-3D Tiles optimization, and output validation. The stages will be connected using a graph structure allowing the mix and match of stages, with a set of standard ready-to-use pipelines available to all of our users. 

Improvements to AEC-to-3D Tiles workflows

Community reception of Cesium’s Design Tiler and Cesium ion for Autodesk Revit Add-In has been overwhelmingly positive, with lots of input on more design applications and features to be supported. With additions from Bentley software, we aim to level up the workflows for AEC data in key areas: 

Support for other CAD formats to 3D Tiles, such as Navisworks, MicroStation, and SketchUp. 

Ability to do incremental near real-time tiling. As you are creating and updating your designs, we want to add the ability to tile only the changed elements, rather than the entire model. This will shorten the life cycle by having a ready-to-go 3D Tileset alongside your design models at all times. This will be complemented by lightweight apps to synchronize your designs into a geospatial experience. 

Enhancements to the LOD generation in the Design Tiler to better support even larger and high-detail projects. 

Specialized 3D Tiles selection algorithms using metadata-driven rendering, filtering, and search. 

Triangle mesh of an AEC model with 10 million triangles created in Autodesk Revit and visualized in CesiumJS using 3D Tiles.

If you’d like to see specific software or features supported, reach out to us on the community forum. 

Advance Cesium runtime engines to capitalize on new 3D Tiles extensions and product integrations

Cesium’s open source runtime engines—CesiumJS for the browser and plugins for Unreal Engine, Unity, and NVIDIA Omniverse—are the face of the platform as the software users experience and interact with the most. The roadmap for runtime engines will advance the convergence of built and natural environment, AEC and geospatial, and of iTwin Platform and Cesium, providing developers and users with extended capabilities. 

The biggest impact for runtime engines will be the implementation and deep integration of the aforementioned updates to the 3D Tiles specification including 3D Gaussian splats, voxels, time-dynamic 3D Tiles, geometry highlights, implicit surfaces, and more. The addition of these advancements in every runtime will be a giant leap forward for many industries and applications. 

With the aim to lower the barrier to entry for building applications that integrate iTwin Platform APIs and services, we’ll add developer APIs and user interfaces for easy integration with iTwins. This means you will be able to build 3D geospatial applications integrating engineering and business information from iTwin into Cesium applications, similar to services like Cesium ion. 

In addition to the cross-cutting updates we covered above, we’re also making engine-specific improvements: 

Add configurable preset camera options to allow other navigation types, such as first-person walkthroughs in indoor spaces, underground, and undersea, toward more immersive applications. 

Improve vector data visualization, including rendering improvements to lines rendering, billboards, and overall scalability of these systems. 

Support multiple viewports for different views in the same runtime with optimized streaming and selection algorithms. This benefits a broad spectrum of applications, including AEC, simulation, operational environments, infrastructure inspections, and many more. 

Develop a new Sandcastle to make onboarding, prototyping, and learning easier. 

Longer term, we’ll explore using WebGPU as a generational advancement in Graphics API. We’re also interested in unifying the 3D Tiles selection and traversal algorithms using Cesium Native via WebAssembly, creating a single reusable library for all Cesium runtimes, resulting in faster updates and efficiency across the board. As we explore these forward-looking upgrades, we’ll continue to invest in the broad compatibility of CesiumJS across browsers, platforms, and devices. 

3D reality mesh with AI-powered reality analysis-generated features visualized in CesiumJS.

Cesium Native, Cesium for Unreal, Cesium for Unity, and Cesium for Omniverse

Introduce a decoration system for runtime enrichment of 3D geospatial scenes with 3D assets. The system empowers creators building rich 3D geospatial environments to add capabilities like runtime editing of 3D Tiles materials, adding 3D objects to the environment, such as trees, cars, and city furniture, and synchronizing with the cloud. This will allow you to dynamically augment captured reality data with high-fidelity models at runtime, such as from Unreal Engine’s Fab marketplace. 

Performance is an evergreen pursuit with all runtime engines, but especially so with the native runtimes, where the benchmarks are real-time games. We’ll continue to invest in performance optimizations that reduce latency, improve game thread usage, lower memory overhead, and overall create a seamless experience. 

With the introduction of time-dynamic 3D Tiles for use cases like project scheduling and simulation, we’ll also add capabilities that take advantage of game engine features like animations, physics, controllers, and more. This will help create a full digital twin of not just the environment but also the vehicles, heavy machinery, traffic simulation, equipment, tools, and other IoT devices.  

iModel of a soccer stadium in Singapore visualized in Cesium for Unreal as 3D Tiles using iTwin’s Mesh Export service.

Building geospatial applications needs data, which is usually fragmented, unprocessed, and not streaming or runtime ready. We aim to lower the barrier to entry by making global datasets accessible, especially where data may be difficult to collect. Toward that goal, we are: 

Upgrading Cesium World Terrain—adding new and higher resolution content across the world. 

Adding high-resolution insets on the Moon. 

Introducing a planetary dataset for Mars. 

Providing analytically derived datasets, such as land-use classification. 

In addition to curated data, we’ll continue to invest in collaborations with Microsoft, Google, and other ecosystem partners to add more datasets for the community via Cesium ion. 

Provide reusable and configurable user experience tools and widgets

In line with our cross-cutting product and open standards investments for more powerful 3D geospatial applications, we will publish a library of reusable and configurable user experience tools and widgets that leverage existing libraries used by iTwin. These will allow you to build even more powerful applications faster and make them configurable, so that each application can refine the widgets and workflows. 

A representative mockup of the new Sandcastle built using the Strata library for components.

Improve learning material and ongoing maintenance

Authentic education is part of Cesium’s mission. Over the years, we have written many tutorials, presented dozens of conference talks, provided hundreds of code examples in Sandcastle, and joined the community in answering over 18,000 topics on the forum, and now we are on the cusp of hosting our first developer conference. 

As the field of 3D geospatial continues to advance, there is also an increase in demand for accessible, up-to-date learning content. To serve our community, we plan to roll out tutorials on reality modeling, AI feature detectors, 3D Gaussian splats, configuring runtime engines, performance optimization, and using and extending metadata in 3D Tiles. We are also creating a new Sandcastle for the example code repository that has improved modern developer tools like IntelliSense, code validation, and better search and organization so you can easily find what you are looking for. 

Finally, ongoing maintenance should not be underrated. It is part of our pact with the community, the heartbeat of the platform, and it generates fresh ideas for our collective roadmap. Pull requests need to be reviewed. Bugs (or fixes!) in browsers or game engines need corresponding updates. Better workflows for engaging with and creating transparency for the community on GitHub and the community forum need to be explored, especially as we introduce iTwin Platform and iTwin Capture. We will increase our essential activity here. 

Our aim is to strengthen and expand the open platform to serve the software developer community building digital twins for the built and natural environment. To do this, we will explore avenues to bring Bentley's capabilities to you, along with increasing our investments in R&D, the open-source community, and industry collaborations. 

Throughout Cesium’s history, the community has guided us, and we want to continue to hear from you. What are the products, features, integrations, and bug fixes that you would like to see?  Are there capabilities within iTwin or other Bentley products we should prioritize for integration? Are there open standards we should integrate or partnerships we should invest in? 

We want to hear all requests—big or small—for what you would like to see from Cesium and for the ecosystem in general. Share your thoughts with us on the community forum.

Cesium Roadmap for Bridging the Built and Natural Environment 

We are excited to share that a geospatially accurate 3D Globe is now available in the open source platform QGIS as part of the QGIS 3.44 stable release. This development fulfills a critical need for QGIS users, enabling visualization of both 3D Tiles and other standard geospatial layers at global scale. This project is the next step toward greater access to 3D geospatial tools in QGIS. 

In QGIS 3.44, users have the option to create a new 3D Globe view in their projects. Courtesy North Road and Lutra Consulting.

A geospatially accurate 3D Globe is now available in the open source platform QGIS as part of the QGIS 3.44 stable release. This work is the result of a Cesium Ecosystem Grant supporting the partnership of Lutra Consulting and North Road, serving QGIS’s million active users.

3D Globe in QGIS by North Road and Lutra Consulting

This work is the result of a Cesium Ecosystem Grant supporting the partnership of Lutra Consulting and North Road, serving QGIS’s million active users. This is the second grant for the team; the first enabled 3D Tiles visualization in QGIS.  

In QGIS 3.44, users have the option to create a new 3D Globe view in their projects. This complements the existing option to create a small scale, local 3D Scene. Globe views display the world as a geospatially accurate ellipsoid and show 3D content (such as 3D Tiles) alongside projected 2D map content (such as raster, mesh, and vector datasets). They are rendered with an intuitive shading effect to allow for better depth perception.  

New York City, USA, in QGIS, as Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles via Cesium ion. Courtesy North Road and Lutra Consulting.  

Update your QGIS to the latest release, 3.44.  

You can create a new 3D Globe view by selecting the View menu, 3D Map Views, and clicking “New 3D Globe View.” This will open a new 3D globe, showing Earth (or a different celestial body) as an ellipsoid. 

For optimal results, we recommend loading 3D Tiles from the QGIS Cesium ion plugin, which connects directly to your data.  

We welcome feedback from the community. File a QGIS issue report or feature request to share your thoughts with us.

Hobu, Inc., with its deep roots in open-source geospatial, has led the contributions of standards and tools such as PROJJSON, ASPRS LAS, Cloud Optimized Point Cloud (COPC), and the Point Data Abstraction Library (PDAL). To enable Hobu’s users to visualize and interact with massive point clouds and raster data, the company developed its browser-based Eptium viewer using CesiumJS.

Eptium builds upon CesiumJS to allow users to directly visualize and interact with COPC and Cloud Optimized GeoTIFF in the browser in 3D. Supporting these archive and transmission formats reduces data duplication and conveniently enables visualization of commonly available cloud content. Eptium makes city- or country-scale point cloud datasets accessible for visualization and analysis on the web, especially for disadvantaged users. Streamlined access to massive cloud-based datasets enables interactivity and understanding for a broad audience, including those in the field or students and professionals using devices without high-end graphics capabilities.

Eptium users can perform multipoint observer line-of-sight (LOS) analysis, generate viewsheds, and export GeoTIFF or SVG images directly from the browser without the need for specialized desktop software. They are able to collaborate by saving and sharing application view state as links. Customers use Eptium as a complete web application, build with it as a JavaScript developer bundle, or directly use it for free by visiting eptium.com and pointing at their own data.

Point cloud and viewshed of Montreal, Canada, in Eptium. Courtesy Hobu.

Distribution of point clouds as COPC eliminates the need for extensive preprocessing or local storage of large files. Eptium consumes COPC data on the fly, converting it into 3D Tiles in-browser for efficient streaming. Eptium optionally uses Cesium World Terrain via Cesium ion and Bing Maps Aerial imagery for additional geospatial context. For a comprehensive picture of areas of interest, this data is fused in CesiumJS, which was built for interactive web apps and scaling for massive datasets.

Eptium, COPC, and CesiumJS also power the moonlidar.com application that Hobu's Connor Manning created in support of NASA’s recomputation of the Moon’s elevation.

The Hobu team uses CesiumJS for moonlidar.com. Courtesy Hobu.

By combining Hobu's expertise with CesiumJS, the Hobu team empowers geospatial users by making complex 3D data accessible and actionable.

Learn to build your own CesiumJS app for 3D geospatial visualization and analysis on the web by following our tutorials.

Hobu's Eptium Visualizes Country-Scale Point Clouds with CesiumJS

The English Premier League reigns supreme among domestic football leagues (soccer in the US), celebrated for its elite talent, fast-paced matches, and unmatched reach. Belgium-based Boost Graphics uses Cesium for Unreal and Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles to create a series of dynamic 3D map animations, known as locators, that provide a fresh perspective on the geography of the league's stadiums across the United Kingdom for a global TV audience of around 3.2 billion.  

Boost's locator guiding Premier League's TV audience along the River Tyne to the home of Newcastle United, St. James Park. Courtesy Boost Graphics.

Boost Graphics/Premier League: Newcastle United, St. James Park, UK

Tim Van Dingenen, Boost’s technical motion design team lead, explained that the locators are part white-knuckle ride and part geography lesson. “Viewers can learn more about the area of England where the game is being played, and the journey there,” he said. “And we wanted their experience to look as good as something you could capture with a drone or helicopter.” 

The Premier League approached Boost with the project in June 2023, requiring detailed visualizations for each of the league's 20 stadiums. They sought 80 videos, in short and long formats for varying broadcast time, and both day and night versions to match the time of the match.  

And the Premier League required all 80 videos before the start of the 2023-24 season, giving Boost two months to complete the project.  

Boost's Premier League locators come in two versions, tailored for use based on timing of the game. Courtesy Boost Graphics.

Boost has been building 3D maps since 2015, starting with visualizations of the Tour de France for European and US broadcasters. Van Dingenen estimates that building those visualizations took 15-30 hours for each of the race's 21 stages to download a mix of satellite and open-source terrain, landscape, and land mass data, including buildings, forests, and water features. Combining and loading the data into the expansive and detailed scenes required 120 gigabytes of RAM.

Creating interactive 3D visualizations became easier for Boost when Google replaced manually modelled buildings with photogrammetry-based models in Google Earth. It became easier, more realistic, and more performant with Cesium for Unreal and Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles.  

Built on open standards and APIs, Cesium for Unreal combines the 3D geospatial capability of Cesium with the high-fidelity rendering power of Unreal Engine, unlocking the 3D geospatial ecosystem for game engines. Cesium for Unreal enabled Boost to integrate multiple data formats, including photogrammetry and purchased BIM models, into their Premier League locators. This capability proved particularly useful in visualizing a completed Everton Stadium, which was undergoing construction while Boost was completing their project.  

Boost was well covered with the other stadiums. Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles offer high-resolution 3D maps in many of the world's populated areas. “You put in the GPS coordinates of where you want to work, and Cesium just immediately loads in everything,” said Van Dingenen. 

Photorealistic 3D Tiles use the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) community standard 3D Tiles format. This format, created by Cesium, efficiently streams massive amounts of data.  

The Boost team made their deadline, with several days to spare. “We did about 90 days of work in 30 days,” said Van Dingenen. He estimates that Cesium for Unreal and accessing Photorealistic 3D Tiles saved Boost around US $75,000 in labor hours. 

Boost's team working with Photorealistic 3D Tiles in Unreal Engine. Courtesy Boost Graphics.

Pairing Photorealistic 3D Tiles with Unreal Engine allowed Boost to replicate natural light, shadows, and fine surface detail viewers would notice in the real world. “We couldn’t have done this without Cesium,” Van Dingenen said while demoing a night fly-over of Everton Stadium, featuring streetlights shimmering off the River Mersey.

Boost Graphics is working on a fresh batch of animations for the 2025-26 Premier League season, which kicks off in August.  

Follow the Cesium for Unreal tutorials to bring immersive 3D geospatial to your Unreal Engine projects.

Boost Graphics Uses Cesium to Give Premier League's Global Audience a Geography Lesson

With Ansys Systems Tool Kit (STK), engineers model land, sea, air, and space scenarios to understand the relationships among vehicles, payloads, facilities, and environments, including terrain. Ansys Geospatial Data Cloud (GDC) integrates Cesium ion Self-Hosted and global 3D content to provide STK with out-of-the-box access to accurate geospatial context within its time-dynamic simulations.

UAV over Boston in Ansys STK, with Geospatial Data Cloud using Cesium ion Self-Hosted. Courtesy Ansys.

STK was released in 1989 to serve US and allied aerospace and defense organizations, and GDC will be available to STK users in July 2025. Users may create virtual worlds including buildings, terrain, and other physical structures. Subsequently, an infinite number of simulation configurations may be exercised, resulting in a significant reduction in the dependence on physical prototypes.

Using Cesium, GDC will replace Ansys’ Geospatial Content Server, removing the need to develop and maintain their own real-world data, tilers, and hosting solution.

“Being able to use Cesium ion Self-Hosted has saved a significant number of man hours that can be redirected towards additional ways to take advantage of the unprecedented access to data. We estimate the time savings to be the equivalent of half a full-time employee,” the Ansys team noted.  

Cesium has helped Ansys enhance mission modeling since 2011.

Communication signal to noise over Boston in Ansys STK, with Geospatial Data Cloud using Cesium ion Self Hosted. Courtesy Ansys.

Cesium ion Self-Hosted provides hosting, tiling, and streaming for massive heterogeneous 3D geospatial datasets in users’ own clouds, data centers, or edge devices, enabling air-gapped solutions that meet strict security requirements and can be deployed to remote, disconnected environments.

GDC accesses Cesium World Terrain, Cesium World Bathymetry, Cesium OSM Buildings, Japan 3D Buildings and Terrain, and Cesium Moon Terrain via Cesium ion Self-Hosted. Accurate elevation data, depth data, and per-building metadata support planning and analysis in critical simulations. Cesium OSM Buildings are streamed as 3D Tiles in conjunction with Cesium World Terrain or Cesium World Bathymetry. Users can add their own datasets to be tiled into 3D Tiles for optimal streaming and visualization in STK.

UAV flying low over Boston in Ansys STK, with Geospatial Data Cloud using Cesium ion Self-Hosted.

Real-world data enables clearer pictures for analysis and decisions in complex multidomain scenarios.

Create and host 3D content in your own environment with Cesium ion Self-Hosted, and visit Ansys in the Cesium booth at GEOINT Symposium, #2231, to see Geospatial Data Cloud in action.

Hear from Ansys at the 2025 Cesium Developer Conference. Register to join us in Philadelphia in June.

Ansys Uses Cesium ion Self-Hosted for Geospatial Data Cloud

GEOINT Symposium is one of my favorite events of the year. It’s where the geospatial intelligence community comes together to share how we’re advancing national security through geospatial innovation, and Cesium is proud to once again sponsor and participate. 

Next week, May 19-21, you can find us in St. Louis at BOOTH 2231, where we’ll showcase the latest from Cesium’s 3D geospatial platform, from open standards to secure, mission-ready deployments, from seabed to space.

Visit Cesium in BOOTH 2231 at GEOINT Symposium 2025.

our Moon Lander Game, built with Cesium for Unreal and Cesium Moon Terrain,

One World Terrain Well Formed Format, powered by 3D Tiles, and