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Cesium for Omniverse v0.28.0

Cesium for Unity Samples v1.23.1

CesiumJS 1.141

3D Tiles

3D Gaussian splats are now available in the Cesium and 3D Tiles ecosystems, including CesiumJS, Cesium for Unreal, and Cesium ion. This integration enables developers to stream and visualize high-fidelity, photorealistic 3D content that captures the real world with unprecedented detail. By leveraging 3D Tiles as a spatial index and glTF as the payload, massive 3D Gaussian splat datasets can now be streamed with level of detail (LOD), ensuring high performance from city-scale environments down to sub-centimeter details. 

3D Gaussian splatting is an efficient radiance field reconstruction method that converts 2D images into a sparse cloud of volumetric 3D Gaussians. Unlike traditional photogrammetry, which often struggles to represent thin or complex structures, 3D Gaussian splats excel at preserving visual fidelity for cables, power lines, vegetation, and reflective surfaces by creating a point cloud of soft, rounded shapes of the subject, with each point defined by properties including position, orientation, color, and opacity. This technique uses spherical harmonics to support view-dependent lighting, allowing for realistic specular reflections and anisotropy that traditional reality meshes cannot easily replicate. 

3D Gaussian splats are now available in the Cesium and 3D Tiles ecosystems, including CesiumJS, Cesium for Unreal, and Cesium ion.

3D Gaussian Splats with Hierarchical Level of Detail Using 3D Tiles

3D Gaussian splatting provides significant advantages for industries requiring high-fidelity reality capture and photorealistic digital twins, including infrastructure monitoring, telecom tower maintenance, and electrical utility and substation inspections—plus the built environment, such as in real estate, where traditional mesh and point cloud methods often have limits. Beyond industrial applications, we see 3D Gaussian splats being adopted in media and entertainment to capture challenging visual details like reflections, semitransparent materials, and fire. 3D Gaussian splats are expected to play a key role in long-term asset monitoring and situational awareness, enabling users to track changes in the natural and built environment over the entire life cycle. 

3D Gaussian splats enable high-fidelity accurate visualizations of thin-and-long assets like cranes, building materials, power stations, and cell towers. This crane is depicted with Cesium for Unreal.

3D Gaussian splats enable high-fidelity accurate visualizations of thin-and-long assets like cranes, building materials, power stations, and cell towers. This scene is depicted in CesiumJS.

Standardizing 3D Gaussian splats in glTF with SPZ compression 

To ensure 3D Gaussian splats are interoperable across platforms, we have collaborated with Khronos, Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), Esri, and Niantic Spatial to integrate this new graphics primitive into the glTF 3D asset standard. This effort centers on two new extensions: KHR_gaussian_splatting and KHR_gaussian_splatting_compression_spz. The base glTF extension defines how splats are stored as point primitives, which allows for a graceful fallback to sparse point clouds in renderers that do not yet support rendering 3D Gaussian splats. 

"The geospatial community has been the catalyst for bringing Gaussian splats into glTF as an open, interoperable primitive, and the close collaboration between Cesium, Esri, and Niantic Spatial at OGC and Khronos is a model for how new rendering techniques should enter the industry: quickly, openly, and with broad cross-community backing from day one. Ratification at Khronos elevates Niantic's SPZ compression from an open-source project into a royalty-free open standard, providing the IP certainty that enterprises and platforms need to adopt it at scale." 

—Neil Trevett, President, Khronos Group 

A major challenge for 3D Gaussian splats has been their massive file size, which can hinder efficient streaming. To solve this, we adopted the SPZ compression format, an open source solution provided by Niantic Spatial. SPZ uses advanced quantization techniques and gzip to compress splat data by up to 90% compared to standard PLY files while maintaining visual fidelity. This format is particularly effective at handling spherical harmonic data for specular lighting. Furthermore, the recent SPZ 2.0.0 release introduced improved rotational accuracy for linear geospatial features—such as antennas and power lines—by encoding rotations as normalized quaternions. 

3D Gaussian splats will be added to 3D Tiles as part of the proposed 3D Tiles 2.0 OGC community standard. 

"The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) endorsed 3D Tiles as a Community Standard because it offered a compelling ability to distribute 3D content to users in a performant manner that also adhered to best practices in handling geospatial information and accuracy. This same approach to provide Gaussian splats via glTF and 3D Tiles ensures that the information portrayed by those Gaussian splats is in the right place and provides meaningful context for geospatial analysis."  

— Scott Simmons, Chief Standards Officer, OGC

Creating 3D Gaussian splats using Cesium ion 

With the integration of iTwin Capture technology into Cesium ion, the platform provides an end-to-end pipeline for reality modeling, including the creation of 3D Gaussian splats with LOD. Users can upload source photos directly to Cesium ion, which will automatically reconstruct a 3D Tileset as a mesh, point cloud, or 3D Gaussian splats. 

To accommodate different development needs, these workflows are accessible through both the Cesium ion web interface and via REST APIs, enabling everything from manual one-off uploads to fully automated, high-scale production pipelines. Once tiled, these splats are georeferenced, allowing them to be instantly combined with global datasets like Cesium World Terrain or Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles for full geospatial context. 

3D Gaussian splat tileset of Microsoft Redmond Campus, as viewed in CesiumJS. Captured in partnership with Bentley Systems. This tileset uses 20,169 photos (427.7 gigapixels, DJI FC6310 camera) and covers an area of about 3.7 sq km, with mean ground sampling distance 3 cm. The reconstruction is 110 million splats.

Streaming to CesiumJS, Cesium for Unreal, and more 

CesiumJS now supports 3D Gaussian splat tilesets. The implementation uses specialized shaders for volumetric rendering and high-performance sorting using WebAssembly for increased performance. Developers using CesiumJS can build high-fidelity digital twin applications leveraging 3D Gaussian splat tilesets in conjunction with previously supported data types. 

"The barriers to working with Gaussian splatting continue to fall. With a glTF extension and LOD support now part of 3D Tiles, developers can increasingly work with splats within familiar tools and workflows. Gaussian splats are quickly becoming a professional, scalable medium for delivering lifelike 3D on the web."  

— Michael Rubloff, Founder and Managing Editor, RadianceFields.com 

For developers building immersive experiences with game engines, Cesium for Unreal now supports 3D Gaussian splat tilesets, as well. This enables the integration of massive 3D Gaussian splat dataset rendering into the Unreal Engine ecosystem with the ability to stream 3D Gaussian splats with LOD directly from Cesium ion. In addition to Cesium for Unreal, we plan to add support to Cesium for Unity and other runtime engines based on community feedback. By standardizing splat delivery through 3D Tiles and glTF extensions, we’re ensuring that these assets remain interoperable across platforms as the field of neural rendering evolves. 

Getting started with 3D Gaussian splats 

Upload your own photos to Cesium ion by signing up for a free community account. You can try out live examples in the Cesium Sandcastle or start building your own reality models today. 

Introducing 3D Gaussian Splats with Hierarchical Level of Detail Using 3D Tiles

The GEOINT Symposium is one of my favorite events of the year, and I'm thrilled that Cesium is sponsoring and participating again this year! We're excited to reconnect with the community and dive into the latest geospatial innovations that are advancing national security. 
 
We’ll be at booth 1303 at the Gaylord Rockies in Aurora, Colorado, May 3-6, showcasing the latest from Cesium. Stop by to talk with the team and see how our platform leverages open standards to deliver secure, mission-ready deployments, advanced reality modeling and analysis, and cutting-edge AI integrations. We’ll demonstrate how LLMs and agentic AI can transform the way you interact with your data, enabling natural conversational access to your 3D environments.  

Visit Cesium in booth 1303 at GEOINT Symposium 2026.

Interoperability: The days of siloed systems have faded. Mission success increasingly depends on technologies integrating across environments, domains, and partners.  

Mission-ready 3D geospatial data: We see growing demand for high-fidelity 3D geospatial that serves operations, not just visualization, to “train on the data you operate on.” This ensures simulations, AI models, and mission planning all leverage foundational data to reflect reality. High-res insets captured at the tactical edge are integrated for actionable intelligence. 

LLMs + Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers: As LLMs and agentic AI integrate into mission workflows, 3D Tiles provides a structured, streamable way for these systems to access real-world context. Paired with MCP-style architectures, this enables agents to take action. They can interact with live 3D environments and surface insights in real time.  

Gaussian splats and reality modeling: Beyond traditional meshes, Gaussian splatting allows representation of complex "un-meshable" scenes with incredible photorealism and efficiency. 3D Tiles 2.0 and the upcoming extensions provide the foundation for these massive, high-fidelity reality models to be scalable, interoperable, and analysis ready. 

3D Tiles as the foundation: We will demonstrate government use cases for 3D Tiles 1.1 and highlight new capabilities coming in 3D Tiles 2.0, positioning the open 3D geospatial ecosystem for the next decade. 

Bentley Systems integration: Since joining Bentley, we have doubled down on openness and interoperability, accelerating Cesium’s mission. See how our integration with iTwin bridges the gap between AEC (architecture, engineering, and construction) and GEOINT, providing a subsurface-to-space view of the world. 

iTwin Capture-powered reality modeling and analysis: We're turning raw 2D imagery into high-fidelity 3D reality meshes, point clouds, and Gaussian splats for advanced feature extraction and analysis. 

Cesium AI integrations: By connecting the Cesium ecosystem with the MCP, we enable LLMs and agentic AI to reason about the real world. This includes MCP servers for camera control, entity management, and geolocation, allowing AI assistants to not only query 3D data but also interact with and navigate live CesiumJS scenes. 

Our Moon Lander Game: Back by popular demand and after the successful Artemis II mission to the Moon, we’ll have our Moon Lander Game built with Cesium Moon and Cesium for Unreal. You can also see how CesiumJS was used to track the flight of Artemis II.  (Go, Artemis!) 

Cesium ecosystem in action: We’ll have daily demos from our partners, including Ansys, Blacknight Space, and XRF. 

I’m also excited to present a lightning talk on 3D Tiles 2.0 at 1:10 p.m. on Tuesday in Innovation Corner, outside Exhibit Hall 3, and look forward to your input on the standard. 3D Tiles 2.0 is currently going through the community standard process at OGC.

And, of course, join a great crew from across the geospatial community at the Cesium Reception on Tuesday night at Mountain Pass Sports Bar, upper level, from 9 p.m. to midnight. 

The future of geospatial is being built on open standards, interoperability, and AI-driven insights. We can't wait to explore these trends with you and shape the next decade of geospatial innovation together. 

Connect with us at BOOTH 1303 and feel free to schedule a meeting with our team to discuss your specific needs. We look forward to seeing you at GEOINT! 

Editor's note: updated demo partners on April 28, 2026.

In complex, high-pressure environments, how information is presented can be as important as the information itself. XReality Factory (XRF) uses CesiumJS and Cesium for Unity for a single shared operational view for better, faster decisions across real operations and training scenarios, throughout defense, security, and emergency management.

XRF's tools consolidate data sources and connect agencies via a single shared operational view with 3D geospatial context for better decisions. Courtesy XRF.

XReality Factory

The volcanic eruptions on the Spanish island of La Palma in 2021 were the tipping point for XRF’s founding team, with expertise in extended reality and interactive technologies, to build tools to consolidate data sources and connect agencies via a single shared operational view with 3D geospatial context for better decisions.

“What we were developing in gaming is useful in emergencies, useful to our heroes,” said Raul Espada, XRF’s CRO.

XRF supports users in critical infrastructure, defense, emergency management, and security, working with the Spanish Armed Forces, Royal Netherlands Armed Forces, public authorities, and industry. In NATO exercises with armed forces from multiple nations on different systems, XRF tools served as the common operating picture (COP), enabling coordination across distributed teams, improving situational awareness, and accelerating decision-making with meaningful information, instead of a barrage of siloed data. The company is part of NATO’s EU Defence Innovation Scheme (EUDIS) and Defence Innovation Accelerator for the North Atlantic (DIANA) programs.

In NATO exercises, XRF tools served as the COP, enabling coordination across distributed teams. Courtesy XRF.

At the core of XRF’s dual-use command and control (C2) system is Compass, a platform for fusing data from several sources into a trusted 3D COP. With Cesium World Terrain or Cesium World Bathymetry via Cesium ion as Compass’s base, users add their own 3D models, drone imagery, and other information layers specific to their missions and organizational requirements for rapid, efficient delivery, streaming as 3D Tiles into CesiumJS for the web and Cesium for Unity for XR.

Around Compass, XRF developed complementary tools:

Apolo, a mobile app for units deployed on the ground, built with CesiumJS;

Colossus, a large multitouch command table for fixed control rooms, using CesiumJS;

Sandbox, an XR multiuser command center for planning, training, and operations, built on Cesium for Unity and device agnostic across Microsoft HoloLens, Meta Quest, and Apple Vision Pro; and

Hermes, XRF’s AI system that interprets scenarios to support decisions with natural language.

With real-world data available on a variety of devices, users can more quickly understand terrain, elevation, line of sight, and spatial relationships in context.

“Our goal has always been to integrate the solution the final user needs in their unifying system, so most of our effort goes into interoperability,” said Antonio Sanchez, XRF’s primary developer.

3D Tiles, an OGC community standard built on glTF and other 3D data types, enables XRF’s users to efficiently stream massive datasets, at any scale, together. The view their users need is the one that will load with the most detail, supporting immersive visualization and analysis on both high-end workstations and bandwidth-constrained devices.

XRF uses Cesium ion SaaS for testing, demos, and situations with reliable internet. The team and its users employ Cesium ion Self-Hosted for strict internal security requirements and off-grid environments.

“The level of performance—rendering continental-scale terrain down to tactical detail, with multiple users connected—is essential for user trust. In defense and emergency contexts, if the visualization stutters or lags, the system is not usable. The feedback we’ve received confirms that the 3D view is responsive and dependable,” Sanchez said.

XRF’s users report clearer briefings, faster alignment across teams, more confident decisions, and smoother transitions because of the connected, integrated approach, with the 3D geospatial foundation as a key enabler.

The volcanic eruptions on the Spanish island of La Palma in 2021 were the tipping point for XRF’s founding team. Pictured here is La Palma in XRF's Apolo, a mobile app for units deployed on the ground, built with CesiumJS. Courtesy XRF.

The volcanic eruptions on the Spanish island of La Palma in 2021 were the tipping point for XRF’s founding team. Pictured here is La Palma in XRF's Colossus, a large multitouch command table for fixed control rooms, using CesiumJS. Courtesy XRF.

XRF estimates that using Cesium reduced its time to first operational deployments by 30-40%. Because the team does not need to build or maintain the core 3D terrain or streaming architecture, they are able to focus on additional features—and lower their ongoing costs by replacing disconnected tools with one shared system, just as they’re doing for their users in defense, security, and emergency management.

Learn more about optimizing, hosting, and streaming your data in an immersive, shared source of truth for time-sensitive action.

Hear from XRF at the 2026 Cesium Developer Conference. Register to join us in Philadelphia in June.

XRF Connects and Integrates Missions with Cesium

The Netherlands, perhaps more than any other country, appreciates how critical what lies below the surface is to what's built above. Much of the country sits below sea level, meaning groundwater is high, and centuries of silt and sand deposits from continental rivers mean the soil is soft. Consequently, understanding the makeup of the ground is of paramount importance for city planning.

Bedrock.engineer visualizes large geospatial subsurface datasets using 3D Tiles voxels. Here they use 3D Tiles voxels to visualize GeoTOP, a public geological model of the Netherlands by the Dutch Geological Survey. Courtesy Bedrock.engineer.

Visualizing national scale subsurface data with 3D Tiles voxels

GeoTOP demo by Bedrock.engineer

Unfortunately, subsurface data is challenging to share: the science is highly technical, and visualizations are often limited to PDFs, hand‑drawn cross sections, or specialized desktop software. That’s why Bedrock.engineer was founded. Bedrock.engineer works to make geotechnical data—boreholes, CPT tests, ground models, and analysis results—more accessible and easier to integrate into the tools engineers and stakeholders use. One of their interests is 3D visualization of subsurface models in the browser. Using the 3D Tiles 2.0 draft voxels extension in CesiumJS, they are streaming large subsurface datasets, demonstrating how open-format 3D Tiles enables geological voxel models to be explored in spatial context directly in the browser. Open source software and open data formats are central to how Bedrock.engineer works.

Bedrock.engineer visualizes subsurface data, like these boreholes in Hong Kong, together with above ground data in CesiumJS. Courtesy Bedrock.engineer.

Subsurface visualization with 3D Tiles voxels

Voxel representations, which can model continuous volumes and store material properties such as soil type, are ideal for subsurface datasets that hold continuous data like sediment layers. But visualizing very large voxel datasets in a geospatial context was not possible with open standards before 3D Tiles support.

Bedrock.engineer visualizes GeoTOP’s 50m deep subsurface data covering the entire Netherlands in CesiumJS using voxels. Courtesy Bedrock.engineer.

With the addition of voxel support in the draft 3D Tiles 2.0 specification, Bedrock.engineer can now combine voxel‑based subsurface models with 3D Tiles’ hierarchical streaming. Voxel renderings are currently a 3D Tiles extension and are part of the 3D Tiles 2.0 proposal, which was described at the 134th OGC Member Meeting in March. Bedrock.engineer has built their own Python tooling to convert gridded scientific formats, such as NetCDF, into 3D Tiles. 3D Tiles makes it possible to visualize dense, volumetric datasets covering an entire nation directly in the browser.

Bedrock.engineer brings GeoTOP data into CesiumJS using the 3D Tiles open standard, as in this dataset from Amsterdam. Courtesy Bedrock.engineer.

3D Tiles voxels make visualizing geoscience models possible, and bringing those 3D Tiles into CesiumJS makes it usable. What Bedrock.engineer appreciates most about CesiumJS is that visualizations are widely accessible to anyone with the link, allowing technical and nontechnical stakeholders to interact with the data directly.

"What 3D Tiles voxels change is accessibility. Subsurface models that used to require specialist desktop software can now be explored directly in the browser, in true 3D, in spatial context with the world above ground. And because it’s an open format, there’s no lock-in: anyone can build on it and combine it with their own data. That considerably lowers the barrier." 

– Jules Blom, Cofounder Bedrock.engineer

By bringing subsurface data into CesiumJS, Bedrock.engineer is also able to combine that data with other datasets, including terrain and buildings, for a more complete picture. For city planning, seeing what is below ground is only valuable if it’s shown in context with the natural and built environment above. Building on CesiumJS, Bedrock.engineer has implemented multivariable filtering, allowing users to see just the relevant data for any given application.

Fence diagrams make it easier to see layers of subsurface sediment. Courtesy Bedrock.engineer.

A prime example of Bedrock.engineer’s work is their CesiumJS visualization of GeoTOP, a public geological model of the Netherlands by the Dutch Geological Survey. By bringing GeoTOP into CesiumJS as 3D Tiles, Bedrock.engineer can embed the model in any browser-based application, combine it with other datasets in spatial context, and build custom tools on top of it, all using an open standard.

Every square meter of land in the Netherlands is designated for a particular use, such as agricultural, urban development, or green space. Municipalities are legally obliged to consider subsurface data whenever it is relevant to a public task. Courtesy Bedrock.engineer.

The GeoTOP model is well suited for governments seeking to better understand the geological features of their area at a regional scale. In the Netherlands, government bodies are legally required to consult BRO subsurface data, including models like GeoTOP, whenever it is relevant to a public task. Bedrock.engineer’s visualization makes it easier to understand and communicate what that data actually shows. When a local government can clearly see what’s below ground, they can make better decisions around spatial planning, groundwater management, land subsidence, and dike safety assessments.

Such visualization can also be useful to building developers in the early stages of a project. Knowing whether they’ll be dealing with peat or sand makes a significant difference when considering foundation type. Though GeoTOP is not a substitute for a full geotechnical investigation, but it gives a useful first indication before that work begins.

Semi-transparent voxel rendering of geophysical models reveals subsurface structures, creating an X-ray–like view of the underground. Data courtesy Emerald Geomodelling, image courtesy Bedrock.engineer.

Bedrock.engineer is working to add GeoTOP data to the LEIA viewer, a CesiumJS-based digital twin for the provincial government of Zeeland, Netherlands. Bringing GeoTOP into LEIA will allow policy makers to see subsurface data in spatial context with other government datasets. Bedrock.engineer has also brought a shallow subsurface model of the Antwerp urban region and harbor into CesiumJS, visualized as 3D Tiles voxels.

Voxel support is part of the draft 3D Tiles 2.0 specification, a key aspect of our commitment to open standards. If you’re working with volumetric data, explore the 3D Tiles OGC Community Standard, try it in CesiumJS, and share your feedback on GitHub. We’d love to see your implementation.

Bedrock.engineer Streams Subsurface Data at Nation Scale with 3D Tiles Voxels

Over the last 20 years, technology and the nature of conflict have changed more rapidly than US defense policies and military procedures. To modernize and synchronize operational-level planning, Sandtable uses CesiumJS, Cesium for Unity, and Cesium ion to combine traditional military planning documents and immersive geospatial context.

For operational wargaming in the COA analysis step of the MDMP, as well as mission rehearsal, Sandtable Navigator provides a 4D environment built with Cesium for Unity. Pictured here are friendly and enemy units at the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, California, USA. Courtesy Sandtable.

For operational wargaming in the COA analysis step of the MDMP, as well as mission rehearsal, Sandtable Navigator provides a 4D environment built with Cesium for Unity. Pictured here are friendly and enemy units at the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, California. Courtesy Sandtable.

Sandtable: COA Analysis

Founded in 2024 by US Army veterans and researchers, Sandtable pairs AI with human judgment in its Mentat and Navigator prototypes to facilitate mission analysis, course-of-action (COA) development, and operational wargaming with more data, detail, and speed.

Planning, collaboration, and rehearsal tools tend to involve 2D imagery, spreadsheets, printed documents, a physical sand table, and the risks that come with putting a group of key people in the same place simultaneously. The company’s push to bring time-dynamic 3D to military planning results in interactive environments that fuse data types and sources to support planning and assessment for both human teams and autonomous systems, no matter where they are. 

During COA DEV, planners using Sandtable Mentat create, visualize, and share unit symbology, operational graphics, viewshed, and ranges of weapon systems in 4D. Courtesy Sandtable. 

“What we’re simulating and planning—like drones, counterdrone technology, and electromagnetic warfare—exists in 3D space in reality, and we need to be able to represent reality. That requires Cesium,” said Sandtable COO Brady Moore. 

And reality is complex: data comes from myriad sources, and conditions shift over time. With AI, the platform helps surface patterns, compare options, and stress-test assumptions, so commanders can focus their judgment where it matters most.

Planners drag and drop MIL STD 2525D symbols from predefined combat power data to build enemy SITEMPs and friendly COAs in Mentat. Courtesy Sandtable.

Planners drag and drop MIL STD 2525D symbols from predefined combat power data to build enemy SITEMPs and friendly courses of action in Mentat. Courtesy Sandtable.

Sandtable: Enemy SITEMPs and Friends COAs

Cesium is deployed across Sandtable’s solution to accelerate key phases of the military decision-making process (MDMP), particularly mission analysis, COA development, and rehearsal, with authoritative geospatial context and efficient data delivery:

Mentat, built with CesiumJS, incorporates written orders, concept sketches, and open datasets, e.g., for soil density and composition, on top of real-world terrain in a browser for rapidly adjusting COAs with AI.

Navigator uses Cesium for Unity for COA analysis and mission rehearsal in a shared virtual environment, wherever participants are, on a variety of devices. Instead of merely rehearsing plans produced in Mentat, Navigator feeds insights back into the planning environment—enabling continuous refinement rather than one-time execution.

Sandtable Mentat allows planners to determine which factors about the terrain are relevant to operations and visualize them together or separately. Courtesy Sandtable. 

With detailed geospatial data from Cesium ion and a range of public and government sources (for example, NOAA and USDA datasets), warfighters and autonomous vehicles know not only where hills and trees are but also microterrain features relevant to mobility and line of sight. This is important because factors like height of vegetation determine what a drone can—or can’t—see (depending on available data resolution and source quality). This data is primarily 3D Tiles, quantized mesh, and KML/KMZ, optimized, hosted, and streamed via Cesium ion for efficiency and interoperability. Cesium ion also enables Sandtable to be data agnostic, because 3D Tiles is an OGC community standard, and can use the Army's own Well Formed Format data when available. Sandtable uses Cesium ion SaaS while connected to the internet and anticipates leveraging Cesium ion Self-Hosted in future disconnected or denied environments, as well as secure enclaves.

Sandtable Mentat develops its own Modified Combined Obstacle Overlay (MCOO) using CesiumJS to visualize layers. Sandtable’s detailed datasets help determine terrain trafficability. Other terrain data includes canopy height, land use, soil attributes, slope, and elevation. Courtesy Sandtable.

Sandtable Mentat develops its own Modified Combined Obstacle Overlay (MCOO) using CesiumJS to visualize layers. Sandtable’s detailed datasets help determine terrain trafficability. Other terrain data include canopy height, land use, soil attributes, slope, and elevation. Courtesy Sandtable.

Sandtable: Modified Combined Obstacle Overlay (MCOO)

Critical to Sandtable’s work is embedding with the very people who will use the platform. During the Army’s xTechOverwatch competition in October 2025, the team tested Mentat on a tablet in the field with soldiers during the day and adjusted the capabilities and interface each night, returning the next day with an improved product. Sandtable developers were able to take feedback from concept to functional visualization and analysis in hours rather than days. This speed of development is enabled by adaptable, streaming-ready 3D Tiles and open-source runtimes. (The company’s CEO, Brian Hamilton, is a Cesium Certified Developer, and Sandtable was among the competition’s winners.)  

Watch Sandtable CTO Brent Lance’s 2025 Cesium Developer Conference talk to learn about the role Cesium plays across Sandtable’s solution for the MDMP. 

Military Planning Using Agentic AI and Simulations

Mentat and Navigator have been deemed Awardable on the Tradewinds Solutions Marketplace, making them eligible for government procurement and tightening collaboration between government and industry.

Use Cesium ion to securely fuse high-resolution imagery and terrain with unit-specific data for actionable information and collaboration. Get started with a community account.  

Author’s note: Sandtable’s COO, Brady Moore, is a former Cesium employee. 

Sandtable Modernizes and Synchronizes Military Planning with Cesium

The most costly risk to major infrastructure projects isn't bad weather or poor funding: it's the risk that slips past the constructability review. If not caught soon enough, a single contradiction—like major utility conflicts or an unworkable traffic management plan—triggers millions in wasted taxpayer funds and guarantees years of delay.  

A critical conflict revealed during constructability review: a proposed highway support column lands directly on existing railway tracks. Courtesy WSB.

Although the constructability review is the critical gatekeeper, the process is often trapped in 2D static documents. Engineering design and consulting firm WSB is using Cesium-powered geospatial capabilities in Bentley Infrastructure Cloud Connect to ensure design flaws are caught early.  

Connect provides a secure, open, and scalable environment for engineering services firms, construction firms, and owner-operators to store, manage, and share infrastructure files and data. Cesium’s integration with Connect offers a unified web experience to visualize infrastructure data in full geospatial context.  

“Civil engineering isn’t just about technical analysis—it’s also about solving geospatial challenges,” said Andy Kaiyala, vice president of digital construction management at WSB. An early adopter of Connect, Kaiyala adds “Cesium’s capabilities allow us to incorporate critical spatial information early in the process, helping us make smarter decisions about fitting infrastructure into available space while minimizing disruption.” 

Demonstration showing Cesium’s integration with Bentley Infrastructure Cloud Connect.

Demonstration showing Cesium’s integration with Bentley Infrastructure Cloud Connect.

Cesium + Bentley Infrastructure Cloud Connect

CesiumJS serves as Connect’s visualization front end, rendering massive infrastructure datasets on an interactive map that scales from a global portfolio view—covering multiple projects across regions—down to detailed, project-level insights. Engineering-grade data (such as BIM models, point clouds, and reality meshes) is efficiently streamed as 3D Tiles, the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) community standard created by Cesium.  Connect also integrates Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles, leveraging the 3D Tiles standard to provide high-resolution 3D representations of major cities and terrain. 

Apart from catching obvious errors, Cesium’s geospatial capabilities in Connect help teams uncover hidden, high-impact risks that traditional reviews miss. On a project in the southern United States, WSB quickly identified and effectively communicated a high-risk design problem:  a proposed railroad bridge and major sewer infrastructure were planned adjacent to a protected historic building, prompting a redesign before the project moved to final design —and potentially saving months in schedule delay and millions in public funds. 

Cesium-powered geospatial capabilities in Connect reveal design conflict between a proposed railroad bridge and a historic building. Courtesy WSB. 

A bottom-up view highlights further design conflict between sewer pipes and the proposed bridge pilings. Courtesy WSB.

“Cesium provides a high-performance, scalable, and geospatially accurate environment that brings full context to infrastructure project designs in Connect,” said Bill McNamara, senior director of iTwin and portal experience at Bentley. “It’s not just empowering our end users. It’s driving value across the ecosystem of infrastructure stakeholders.” 

While testing the Cesium integration with Connect, WSB shared curated views of 72 projects with over 900 external stakeholders representing 86 organizations, including state departments of transportation, rail authorities, utilities, and public agencies. “We can bring more stakeholders to the review process earlier, thanks to the intuitive way Cesium enables us to visualize project designs. It’s become a key differentiator for us,” Kaiyala explained.     

“When we show a design model with a 2D map, stakeholders nod politely,” added WSB director of digital construction management strategy Corey Johnson. “But when we show it on an interactive Cesium-powered map surrounded by Photorealistic 3D Tiles, their eyes light up. They immediately understand the proposed design and any constructability issues.” 

For WSB, visualizing engineering data in true geospatial context has elevated constructability reviews from a static checkpoint to a dynamic driver of smarter, faster, and more transparent project delivery. As more organizations adopt Cesium-powered capabilities in Connect, early detection and clear communication of design risks resolve conflicts before shovels hit the dirt. Kaiyala summed up the approach: “Ultimately, Cesium isn’t about pretty pictures; it’s about putting valuable information in the hands of the people who build the infrastructure we all rely on.”  

Sign up for a free Cesium ion account to pair your 3D models with accurate geospatial context.  

WSB Transforms Constructability Reviews with Cesium and 3D Tiles in Bentley Infrastructure Cloud Connect

To modernize defense planning and rehearsal, VRAI used Cesium for Unreal to build the Virtual All-Domain Environment (VADE), enabling users to deeply examine areas of interest before arriving. 

VADE uses Cesium to mirror operational reality. Courtesy VRAI. 

Virtual All-Domain Environment (VADE) uses Cesium to mirror operational reality. Courtesy VRAI.

This Is VADE

An immersive XR platform in the works since 2021, VADE began as a proof of concept between simulation data company VRAI and the Royal Air Force for comprehensive situational awareness and could scale across Defence. VRAI announced VADE’s full release at DSEI in fall 2025. 

Real-world 3D data and live collaboration in VADE enable a common operating picture (COP) for detailed planning and faster decisions. Add XR, and troops familiarize themselves with a location before deploying. VADE can be set for individuals or in multiplayer mode, accessed via desktop app or with headsets.  

The tool’s capabilities span domains: 

For drone intervisibility studies, users can draw routes, mark waypoints at each kilometer, and determine blind spots at specific locations and heights to ensure proper placement anywhere on the globe.  

With a volumetric tool for battlespace management and deconfliction, airspace coordination via VADE is accurate and intuitive.  

High-altitude parachute insertion simulations include trackback lines for descent, giving the distance to the drop zone throughout the line; users can view the line from the aircraft or the ground, with the surroundings they can expect to see.  

Because VADE allows users to customize for NATO standards, slopes turn red if they’re not sufficient for helicopter landing sites (HLS). 

Although VADE is not a targeting tool, users can examine the impacts of explosives. 

Restricted operating zone for UAS overwatch. Courtesy VRAI.

Intervisibility study to ensure proper placement. Courtesy VRAI.

Route planning, with directional arrows and optional kilometer markers. Courtesy VRAI.

Gun target line (GTL) tool. Courtesy VRAI.

GTL and impact of explosives. Courtesy VRAI.

VADE employs Cesium World Terrain and Bing Maps Aerial imagery with Cesium for Unreal to enable users to navigate to places that matter for their missions, manipulating the time of day and simulating weather conditions, with high-fidelity rendering. When users are online, they can pull in Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles for exercises in urban areas, and Vexcel data is a boon when VADE is used as part of an airgapped solution via Cesium ion Self-Hosted.  

The VADE library includes data via Cesium ion; 3D models of aircraft, tanks, and other vehicles; NATO map marking symbols for friendly forces and enemy capabilities; and user-specific sources, like their own imagery, photogrammetry, or GitHub repos. VADE connects to users’ private Cesium ion accounts for hosting, tiling, and streaming efficiently. Using geospecific data via Cesium saves VRAI engineers and their users days of work per location and obviates the need for hand modeling or geotypical data, improving situational awareness and decision speed and reducing the cognitive burden on those tasked with complex planning and rehearsal. 

“It’s a transformative way of planning for defense. We operate in multiple dimensions—why wouldn’t we plan in multiple dimensions?” said Ant Casson, former Squadron Commander in the Royal Air Force and VRAI’s business development lead for the UK and Europe. “The possibilities are endless for VADE, enabled by the powerful tools provided by Cesium for Unreal.”

The VADE library includes 3D models of aircraft, tanks, and other vehicles. Courtesy VRAI.

VADE is dual use: in addition to its defense value, the app’s live 3D COP enables better decisions with real data for emergency services, disaster relief, critical national infrastructure planning, large event planning, and agricultural monitoring.  

Learn to integrate 3D geospatial data when clarity, confidence, and speed matter most. 

VRAI Delivers Virtual All-Domain Environment with Cesium for Unreal 

Amanda: We’re thrilled to welcome Don McCurdy to the Platform team at Bentley. I know Don through his work with open standards: he formerly co-chaired the 3D Formats working group responsible for glTF and created popular open source tools like glTF Transform. As the senior director of open standards at Bentley, vice chair of the Khronos 3D Formats working group, and co-chair of the Metaverse Standards Forum 3D Asset Interoperability working group, I’m passionate about the openness that standards enable. With an eye to the future of standards development, I sat down with Don and with Sean Lilley, who is a lead engineer behind 3D Tiles and a driving force in Cesium’s development, to talk about their contributions to open standards and what they see ahead as developers.

Amanda: Don, you’ve been deeply involved with the development of glTF, the Khronos standard for models and scenes. How did you first get involved in open standards?

Don: I happened to be personally interested in building my own projects with WebGL around the time draft versions of glTF 2.0 were coming together. Loading 3D models into the scene correctly was a real challenge—existing loaders weren’t enough if the format itself wasn’t designed for runtime transmission or isn’t carefully documented in a technical specification.

The vision for glTF immediately felt right—runtime transmission, detailed specifications, and a scope that was opinionated and focused enough for complete implementation and specification to be possible.  I started contributing to a glTF loader in three.js and was introduced to Patrick Cozzi and others at the Khronos Group soon after that.

After that, finding more ways to get involved was easy: there are always more interesting technical challenges than people to solve them. I was also very fortunate to be working with a team that allowed me to spend a percentage of my time on self-directed work in open standards and open source.

Since then I’ve written the glTF Transform library, which is popular for optimizing existing 3D models, but at the same time it’s a very flexible framework for creating or modifying glTF models, or managing custom glTF extensions. I’ve also written three-ish glTF loaders now (too many?)  and a couple popular viewers like gltf.report/.

Amanda: Sean, you’ve been a key contributor to 3D Tiles since its inception. 3D Tiles is an OGC community standard for streaming massive 3D datasets, and is built on glTF. What drew you into the open standards space?

Sean: I first got involved in open standards when I joined Cesium in 2015. Previously, I was using COLLADA and OpenGL in a personal game engine project and was already a big fan of Khronos. One of the first projects I worked on at Cesium was obj2gltf, which started during a code sprint in the Poconos, and later gltf-pipeline.

This was also the year 3D Tiles was announced; I contributed to the specification, CesiumJS implementation, tiling pipelines, and was quite active on the Cesium Community Forum.

Amanda: Both 3D Tiles and glTF have revolutionized the way people visualize 3D data, but that’s just the beginning. I know we have some key work going on in 3D Formats right now with a new glTF version on the horizon and a new 3D Tiles coming right behind it. How do you see these standards evolving over time?

Don: glTF has been successful over the years, at least in part because of its unique focus on efficient, last-mile transmission to runtime. The line glTF needs to walk as it evolves, I think, is to keep that focus while understanding that the mission is a moving target, and that capabilities of runtimes and last-mile 3D data are also evolving.

Other open source or standards projects like OpenPBR, MaterialX, and USD are worth mentioning here. While they don’t necessarily share that transmission-to-runtime goal, they absolutely represent an evolution (for the better!) in 3D content creation, and these changes feed into workflows around glTF.

Importantly, glTF today provides the “building block” for extension into very different use cases – 3D Tiles and VRM especially. I hope that doesn’t change; it’s an important balance of scope.

Sean: At the same time, the community might benefit from glTF and 3D Tiles converging over time. In 3D Tiles 1.0 we had the Batched 3D Model and Instanced 3D Model formats that wrapped binary glTF. In 3D Tiles 1.1 we saw these capabilities move into glTF extensions that allowed 3D Tiles to reference glTF directly.

And now, in the other direction, there's an industry wide push towards using glTF for complex scenes; for example, the AEC industry using glTF for massive design models, and e-commerce using glTF for level of detail.

It seems to me that 3D Tiles and glTF are meeting somewhere in the middle, while staying true to efficient transmission.

Amanda: What community projects using glTF and 3D Tiles are you keeping an eye on?

Don: I worked with R&D at The New York Times a few years back, and they’ve done some really excellent work using both glTF and 3D Tiles in different projects, such as visualizing the progress of the fires in Maui in 2023. They’ve also written “field guides” sharing their processes and learnings for publishing 3D content in journalism.

Sean: Ever since the Google Maps Platform released their worldwide dataset as 3D Tiles, members of the larger community have been building all sorts of interesting applications with that data, like visualizing building projects in context or showing stadium locations in sports reels.

I'm really looking forward to Cesium Native getting WebAssembly support so that we can bring Cesium Native's 3D Tiles streaming engine to the browser.

I'm also actively following Garrett Johnson's 3D Tiles Renderer for Three.js.

Amanda: It’s clear both of you have contributed significantly to the tools and standards making 3D graphics easier than ever to share. What does it mean for Bentley to bring this kind of talent together?

Sean: It’s exciting. Don’s work has influenced how developers and artists optimize and publish 3D content. His tools like glTF Transform and gltf.report are widely used. Having him on board means we’re doubling down on our commitment to open standards and high-quality tooling.

Don: I’ve collaborated with the team before, including on 3D Tiles 1.1. Joining Bentley now feels like a natural next step: Bentley’s investment in open standards is a big reason I’m here. It’s rare to find a company that not only uses open formats but invests in helping define them.

Amanda: For readers interested in pushing the forefront of open standards, how would you recommend getting involved?

Sean: The Cesium community forum is very active and a great place to help other people building in 3D. And the 3D Tiles repo on GitHub is a great place to share ideas.

Don: There’s always need for people to pitch in. If you’re passionate about open standards, the Khronos Group is always looking for volunteers interested in supporting the future of graphics. And the Metaverse Standards Forum, as you know, is doing some really interesting interdisciplinary work.

Amanda: We’re deeply committed to building the tools for an open ecosystem. If you’d like to join us, check out our current openings.

Advancing 3D Tiles and glTF in an Open Ecosystem

The Cesium team will be at the Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation, and Education Conference (I/ITSEC) in Orlando, Florida, December 1-4! I/ITSEC is the world’s largest gathering of professionals in modeling, simulation, and training, and we’re excited to be a part of it once again. 

Join us in BOOTH 221 for Cesium demos curated specifically for the modeling, simulation, and training community. 

Come by the booth to engage directly with our teammates. We look forward to the opportunity to answer your questions and demonstrate the latest capabilities and integrations that enable better decisions, faster. 
  
We will also be hosting a happy hour 3-5 p.m. Tuesday, December 2, at our booth. 

US Army One World Terrain Well Formed Format built on 3D Tiles 

We continue to collaborate with the community to evolve 3D Tiles, including specific enhancements that are part of the US Army’s One World Terrain contract. See live demos of new features in the One World Terrain Well Formed Format (WFF), an extension of 3D Tiles. We’ll stream a massive One World Terrain dataset via Cesium ion to CesiumJS—the same data used for analysis and planning can be used for execution. 