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Cesium for Omniverse v0.28.0

Cesium for Unity Samples v1.23.2

CesiumJS 1.141

Cesium for Unreal

Lu Zhang is perhaps not the only person who sometimes finds running on a treadmill monotonous. During a recent workout he thought how much nicer it would be to run through some of the neighborhoods he used to live in. Since a quick flight to Paris or Shanghai for a run wasn’t realistic, he asked an AI chatbot a simple question: was it possible to recreate real-world neighborhoods in an immersive environment? That was the first time he’d heard of Cesium.

With EarthRunner, Lu is able to take his treadmill runs to cities all over the world. Courtesy Lu Zhang.

As a neuroscientist, Lu has studied spatial navigation—how the brain combines self-motion with external landmarks to represent and move through the world. With AI tools as a learning and prototyping partner, he brought that neuroscience background into geospatial technology and created EarthRunner.

The Parthenon in Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles. With Cesium for Unreal, runners can explore revisit familiar places or explore new areas. Courtesy Lu Zhang.

EarthRunner lets users run through a full-scale 3D world of real places, built with Cesium for Unreal streaming Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles. Locomotion is controlled by the treadmill, and an accompanying iPad interface, created with Python, handles navigation.

A chance to run in familiar cities made workouts more engaging. Lu further enhanced the experience with an AI-powered audio guide that highlights points of interest, making it easy to get to know new places. While EarthRunner remains a personal project, Lu sees possibilities far beyond his own workouts.

An AI-powered audio guide highlights points of interest. Courtesy Lu Zhang.

“AI gave me the confidence to try something completely new with Cesium for Unreal. Seeing the world appear almost exactly as I remembered it from my travels was completely amazing. And when I moved beyond experimenting, the Cesium documentation made it much easier to really understand the platform. After that, it felt like a whole new world opening up.” 

Lu may not have known about Cesium before he began this project, but it enabled him to take an idea sparked during a workout into an application that surpassed his original goals. Lu is now a Cesium Certified Developer, a testament to how accessible 3D geospatial development can be with the right resources. If you’re new to Cesium for Unreal, check out our tutorials to get started building your own custom application with global 3D datasets.

Bringing Earth to the Treadmill with Cesium

In April, we announced the 2026 Cesium Developer Conference tracks, published the full agenda, and highlighted the pre-conference workshops; excitedly tracked Artemis II; made 3D Gaussian splats available in the Cesium and 3D Tiles ecosystems; and shared what we’re showcasing at GEOINT Symposium next week. Will we see you there? Join us in booth 1303. 

We made improvements across Cesium this month. To get notifications about our monthly releases, you can subscribe to the Cesium release roundup thread on our community forum.

CesiumJS 1.141 is now available. Highlights of the release include:

Added support for properties (EXT_structural_metadata) in vector tilesets. #13426 

Bumped minimum required Node version to 22.0.0 .

BufferPrimitiveCollection properties modelMatrix, boundingVolume, and boundingVolumeWC are now readonly. They may be modified, but not reassigned. #13448 

Fixed lighting affecting EquirectangularPanorama. #13369 

Fixed incorrect matrix multiplication for non worldspace instance transforms in pickModel. #13433 

A 3D Gaussian splat tileset of the Microsoft campus in Redmond, Washington, USA, in CesiumJS. (Explore the Sandcastle.)

Cesium for Unreal v2.26.0 is now available. Highlights of this release include:

Added ACesium3DTileset::UnloadEditorTilesInPlayMode, which toggles whether in-editor tileset instances should unload their tiles before Play-in-Editor begins. This can prevent the Editor from duplicating resources for the same tileset and potentially consuming too much memory. 

Added a "Clear Request Cache" Blueprint-callable function to UCesiumRuntimeSettings and a button to Project Settings -> Plugins -> Cesium that clears all entries from the SQLite request cache database. 

Fixed a bug where Gaussian splats would continually accumulate in the scene, eventually causing the application to crash. 

In addition to the above, this release updates cesium-native from v0.59.0 to v0.60.0. See the changelog for a complete list of changes in cesium-native. 

Check the Cesium for Unreal release and the Cesium for Unreal Samples release for the full list of updates.

Download the Cesium for Unreal plugin from Epic Marketplace

The Microsoft campus in Redmond, Washington, USA, visualized with 3D Gaussian splat tilesets in Cesium for Unreal. 

Cesium for Unity v1.23.2 is now available. 

This release updates cesium-native from v0.59.0 to v0.60.0 and brings bug fixes such as:

Fixed a bug in CesiumRasterOverlays::GeoJsonDocumentRasterOverlay where styles set on geometry objects within a FeatureCollection were not applied.   

See the changelog for a complete list of changes in cesium-native. 

Check the Cesium for Unity changelog for the full list of updates, and follow our Cesium for Unity tutorials to get started. 

**Cesium ion SaaS**
- Cesium ion now enables organizations with paid accounts to require the use of SSO when their users log into ion. To learn more, contact support. 
- Cesium ion now generates levels of detail (LODs) for Gaussian splat assets generated through the reconstruction pipeline. 

**Cesium ion Self-Hosted** 
Cesium ion Self-Hosted 1.10.0 is now available. 

- Added support for ingestion and streaming of 3TZ assets. 
- Added UI enhancements to the Cesium ion dashboard. 
- Design tiler: Improved rendering of IFC elements by giving sub-assembly elements the bounding box of the full assembly. 
- Design tiler: Added more graceful handling of IFC lines that don’t meet the IFC specification. 
- Design tiler: Added support for parsing eastings, northings, and orthogonal height from IFC files. 
- Gaussian splats tiler: Added logic to filter out NaN and infinite values when parsing PLY files. 
- Design tiler: Emits double-precision floats (instead of single-precision floats) for IFC attributes and properties. 
- Design tiler: Fixed generation of IFC swept circular geometry for better shading and performance. 
- Design tiler: Fixed issues processing B-splines in IFC files. 
- Design tiler: Fixed issues processing some geometries with swept circles. 
- Reality tiler: Fixed an issue where duplicate vertices in input models could lead to inefficient textures and larger tilesets than necessary. 
- Reality tiler: Fixed a regression where duplicate vertices in the input would be written to tiles, rather than being filtered out. 
- Reality tiler: Significantly reduced memory usage for models with spatially incoherent textures. 

**Asset Server**
- Updated the asset server to the latest version. 

**Design Tiler**
- Added `IfcSpace` relations to element properties in IFC metadata. 

**Reality Tiler** 
- Fixed a race condition that could lead to subtree files with content/availability bits incorrectly set to zero. 

Bedrock.engineer leverages voxel support in draft 3D Tiles 2.0 and CesiumJS to stream large-scale subsurface geoscience data directly in the browser for city planning, infrastructure, and environmental decision-making.

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. 

The Purdue University Envision Center has integrated Cesium for Unity into CollabXR, bringing geospatial support to their XR development platform that allows students and researchers to explore complex datasets together. 

Geotour brings together information about Crete’s history, landscapes, and biodiversity as well as photos, panoramas, and video tours of the island in a single interactive map built using CesiumJS. 

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

In March, we hosted the 134th OGC Member Meeting, attended the inaugural USGIF GEOINTeraction Colorado event, added support for panoramic imagery in CesiumJS, highlighted the Dev Rel team, introduced Cesium for Unity on the web, shared details about the ionosphere at this year’s Cesium Developer Conference, and launched AI-driven semantic search in Sandcastle. 

CesiumJS 1.140 is now available. Highlights of the release include:

Fixes a regression with the NGA-GPM local extension and custom shaders. #13247 

Billboards and labels now require device support for WebGL 2, or WebGL 1 with ANGLE_instanced_arrays and MAX_VERTEX_TEXTURE_IMAGE_UNITS > 0. #13053 #13253 

Added experimental, performance-focused vector primitive APIs:  BufferPointCollection, BufferPolylineCollection, and BufferPolygonCollection. #13212 

Added support for Reality Data of type  ITwinPlatform.RealityDataType.GaussianSplat3DTiles to ITwinData.createTilesetForRealityDataId. #13208 

Added GetFeatureInfo support to WebMapTileServiceImageryProvider, enabling WebMapTileServiceImageryProvider.pickFeatures for both KVP and RESTful WMTS services. New class parameters include enablePickFeatures, getFeatureInfoFormats, getFeatureInfoUrl, and getFeatureInfoParameters. #13196 

Added limited support (via downcasting) for double-precision metadata types in custom shaders. #13323 

Added a new experimental property PathGraphics.relativeTo, which allows entity PathGraphics to be displayed in a reference frame relative to another entity, or a different reference frame than the entity's Position.ReferenceFrame. #13223 

Fixed intermittent label text/background misalignment when using heightReference (CLAMP_TO_GROUND, CLAMP_TO_TERRAIN, or CLAMP_TO_TILE). #13335 

Improved Gaussian splat loading and update performance by reducing transform work, reusing aggregate buffers, and lowering repeated sort churn during camera movement. #13322 

Improved Gaussian splat SPZ decode performance by updating @spz-loader/core to 0.3.1. #13329 

Fixed a crash when decoding large Gaussian splat SPZ files with high spherical harmonics degree. #13287 

Fixed Gaussian splat modelMatrix not being correctly applied to splat positions, rotations, and scales when the tileset transform changes. Fix spherical harmonic view direction being evaluated in the wrong coordinate frame in Gaussian splat rendering, causing subtle color errors for datasets without an embedded axis-compensation matrix. #13305 

Fixed a WebGL crash when rendering Gaussian splat tilesets with more than ~16 million splats. #13235 

No longer disables custom shaders for primitives with missing metadata, as long as the metadata exists on the overall class definition. #13258 

Fix performance issue with multiple ClippingPolygon on Cesium3DTileset. #13255 

ClippingPolygonCollection performance and quality improvements. #13308 

Two orbiting satellites viewed in CesiumJS, with satellite 2's path displayed relative to satellite 1.

Cesium for Unreal v2.25.0 is now available. Highlights of this release include:

Added support for tilesets containing 3DTILES_content_voxels. Voxel metadata can be styled with materials generated by UCesiumVoxelMetadataComponent. 

Added UCesiumGlobeAnchorComponent::HeightReference. Setting this to ECesiumHeightReference::Tileset will cause the actor to maintain its height above the specified tileset during LOD transitions or object movement. 

Added UCesiumGlobeAnchorComponent::ReferencedTileset. Set this field to a ACesium3DTileset actor reference to maintain a fixed height above the tileset. 

Added UCesiumGlobeAnchorComponent::HeightUpdateInterval to specify how often the actor's height is updated when HeightReference is Tileset. 

Added ReceiveDecals property to ACesium3DTileset to allow toggling decal reception per tileset. 

In addition to the above, this release updates cesium-native from v0.58.0 to v0.59.0. See the changelog for a complete list of changes in cesium-native. 

Voxel visualization of geothermal temperature data surrounding Lake Thunersee, Switzerland. Visualized in Cesium for Unreal through glTF and 3D Tiles.

Cesium for Unity v1.23.1 is now available. 

This release updates cesium-native from v0.58.0 to v0.59.0. See the changelog for a complete list of changes in cesium-native. 

Cesium for Omniverse v0.28.0 is now available. Highlights of this release include:

Cesium for Omniverse now requires Kit 109.0 or above (Isaac Sim 6.0.0 or above). 

Peruse the changelog for the full list of updates, and get started with our Cesium for Omniverse tutorials. 

Download the Cesium for Omniverse extension

Download the Cesium for Omniverse samples

**Cesium ion SaaS**
- Coming this week: an update for the reconstruction of Gaussian splats with LODs from photo collections. 

**Cesium ion Self-Hosted**
Cesium ion Self-Hosted v1.9.0 is available.
- Added support for copying assets and stories between individual and teams accounts. 
- Design tiler: Reduced memory usage when processing IFC files. 
- Design tiler: Added support for nested IFC properties. 
- Design tiler: Improved rendering of IFC elements by giving sub-assembly elements the bounding box of the full assembly. 
- Design tiler: Added more graceful handling of IFC lines that don’t meet the IFC specification. 
- Design tiler: Fixed an issue where invalid attributes could be generated when converting from OBJ to glTF. 
- Reality tiler: Fixed an issue that could cause models with multiple sets of texture coordinates to be subdivided more than necessary. 
- Reality tiler: Fixed an issue where a CRS origin could be applied incorrectly if the origin was set from the command line and also found in a sidecar file. 
- Reality tiler: Fixed an issue where duplicate vertices in input models could lead to inefficient textures and larger tilesets than necessary. 
- Reality tiler: Fixed a regression where duplicate vertices in the input would be written to tiles, rather than being filtered out. 
- Minor bug fixes.  

**Gaussian Splats Tilers** 
- Added logic to filter out NaN and infinite values when parsing PLY files.

**Design Tiler**
- Emits double-precision floats (instead of single) for IFC attributes and properties.

Camptocamp’s Geo Challenge game, built in CesiumJS, uses high‑resolution swisstopo data and Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles for a smooth, browser-based 3D guessing experience. 

Matom.AI uses AI with CesiumJS and 3D Tiles to analyze city‑scale point clouds in the browser and maintain continuously up‑to‑date digital twins. 

In February, we attended Geo Week in Denver and discussed interoperability and open standards for Gaussian splats in the RTC AECO Spotlight. This week we’re proud to host the 134th OGC Member Meeting—let us know if you’re in Philadelphia! Plus: two more weeks of early bird devcon registration. 

CesiumJS 1.139 is now available. Highlights of the release include:

Added panorama support via new EquirectangularPanorama and CubeMapPanorama classes, along with GoogleStreetViewCubeMapPanoramaProvider for loading cube map faces from the Google Street View Static API and rendering them in a cube map panorama. #13153 

Added more depth testing options for billboards and labels. #12994 

Added support for more metadata types via property textures in custom shaders. #13135 

Modified Sandcastle application to use a hybrid text and semantic, embedding based search. #13090 

Fixed Gaussian splat race conditions in snapshot/sort updates. #13016 #12965 

Fixed flashing when rendering multiple Gaussian splat primitives. #12967 

Part of a 360-degree panorama image of the interior of Laon Cathedral, France, visualized in CesiumJS. Photo by David Iliff, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Cesium for Unreal v2.23.0 is now available. Highlights of this release include:

Added support for loading tilesets with the KHR_gaussian_splatting extension. 

Added support for styling with tileset statistics on UCesiumFeaturesMetadataComponent. 

Deprecated AddCamera, RemoveCamera, UpdateCamera, and GetCameras on ACesiumCameraManager. Instead, use the new AdditionalCameras array to directly add or remove cameras. 

Added UsePlayerCameras, UseEditorCameras, and UseSceneCapturesInLevel to ACesiumCameraManager to toggle the automatic detection of cameras in the level for tile selection. 

Added ACesiumCameraManager::SceneCaptures for more explicit control over which ASceneCapture2Ds are used for tile selection. 

Added DetectTransformChanges to UCesiumGlobeAnchorComponent to toggle whether the globe anchor should update itself after changes in its Actor's transform. 

Build now uses the tinyxml2 library from Unreal's SDK on Linux and Windows if it is available. This eliminates a source of conflicts with other plugins that also use tinyxml2. 

Removed Cesium3DTileset::getFeaturesMetadataDescription. This can be directly retrieved from its attached UCesiumFeaturesMetadataComponent instead. 

In addition to the above, this release updates cesium-native from v0.57.0 to v0.58.0. See the changelog for a complete list of changes in cesium-native. 

Hines Rowing Center in Conshohocken, PA, visualized in Cesium for Unreal using Gaussian splats produced by iTwin Reality Capture.

Cesium for Unity v1.23.0 is now available. Highlights of this release include:

Added CesiumGeoJsonDocumentRasterOverlay, allowing stylized GeoJSON to be rasterized and draped over terrain and other 3D Tiles. 

Added CesiumGeoJsonDocument to parse and manipulate GeoJSON documents in code. 

Added CesiumGeoJsonObject to access individual features, geometries, and collections within a GeoJSON document. 

Added CesiumVectorStyle, CesiumVectorLineStyle, CesiumVectorPolygonStyle, and CesiumVectorPolygonFillStyle structs for styling vector data. 

A footprint of a proposed design model projected onto Cesium World Terrain using CesiumGeoJsonDocumentRasterOverlay.

Cesium for Omniverse v0.27.0 is now available. Highlights of this release include:

Cesium for Omniverse now requires Kit 107.3 or above (Isaac Sim 5.1.0 or above). 

**Cesium ion SaaS**
- Coming this week: additional options for running photo reconstruction jobs. These will make it possible to tune your automated reality modeling pipelines to better meet your requirements. 

**Cesium ion Self-Hosted**
- Coming this week: new version of Cesium ion Self-Hosted that includes recent updates to the Cesium design and reality tilers. 

**3D Tiling Pipeline** 
- The Design and Reality Tilers are now packaged with the tilers and tools in the 3D Tiling Pipeline. Versions have been unified, and all tilers are now on v5.0.1. 
- Added `terrain-and-imagery-tiler`, which produces 3D Tiles 1.1 output. 
- Removed `quantizedmeshto3dtilesconverter`; it has been replaced by `terrain-and-imagery-tiler`. 
- Fixed an issue where invalid attributes could be generated when converting from OBJ to glTF.

    - **Design Tiler** 
      - Improved rendering of IFC elements by giving sub-assembly elements the bounding box of the full assembly. 
      - Added more graceful handling of IFC lines that don’t meet the IFC specification. 
      - Added support for parsing eastings, northings, and orthogonal height from IFC files. 
      - Fixed generation of IFC swept circular geometry for better shading and performance. 
      - Fixed issues processing B-splines in IFC files. 
      - Fixed issues processing some geometries with swept circles. 

    - **Reality Tiler** 

      - Fixed an issue where duplicate vertices in input models could lead to inefficient textures and larger tilesets than necessary. 
      - Fixed a regression where duplicate vertices in the input would be written to tiles, rather than being filtered out. 
      - Significantly reduced memory usage for models with spatially incoherent textures. 

    - **Buildings Tiler**
      - Fixed an issue where some images in a glTF file had an invalid format and/or incorrect mime type. 

Trailamo uses CesiumJS to bring open geospatial data to mountaineers so they can plan safer, more informed routes anywhere in the world with advanced 3D terrain analysis and layered datasets. 

BADASS Studios uses Cesium for Unreal to create a premium digital fan experience for the E1 Series. 

Creating an XR Connection to the E1 Series with Cesium for Unreal

The E1 Series is the world’s first all‑electric race boat championship, bringing together cutting‑edge engineering, global competition, and high-profile star power. With celebrity‑owned teams and events spanning iconic waterfronts from Jeddah to Monaco, the sport pairs high performance with high glamour. Its RaceBirds—ultralight carbon craft powered by a 150 kW electric motor and lifted by hydrofoils—slice across the water at speeds of up to 50 knots, showcasing the future of sustainable racing and raising awareness for marine conservation.

For such an innovative sport, it should be no surprise that E1 provides a premium digital fan experience, created by BADASS Studios using Cesium for Unreal.

BADASS uses Cesium for Unreal to build a digital replica of E1 race venues, which is used in live broadcasts. Courtesy BADASS Studios.

BADASS builds a precise digital replica of every E1 race venue in Unreal Engine to provide an accurate, large‑scale replica of the environment with event-specific markers, sponsorship markers, and more for enhanced fan experience. Courtesy BADASS.

BADASS Studios: Digital Fan Experience for E1

Building the scene with Cesium for Unreal

For each race, BADASS builds a precise digital replica of the venue in Unreal Engine, using Cesium for Unreal to bring in Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles, which provide an accurate, large‑scale replica of the environment. BADASS artists then add event-specific elements: waypoint markers, shoreline grandstands, and custom buildings along the route, as well as lighting and color adjustments for a vibrant look. They also place sponsorship overlays: a win-win that provides high visibility for sponsors without polluting the oceans and views with billboards or other debris.

Still image of an E1 Series broadcast in Monaco. Courtesy BADASS Studios.

“BADASS operate at the intersection of creativity and technology. Their team take complex data, live telemetry and, working within the constraints of live broadcast, turn them into compelling XR experiences. They are agile, solutions-focused and deeply collaborative and have quickly become an essential extension of E1's content and product function.”

- Laurence Boyd, Chief Content and Product Officer, E1

The digital replica in Unreal provides a critical resource for live broadcasts of the race. During events, BADASS receives updates from a live telemetry feed that captures boat position, lift, trim, throttle, RPMs, and more. Their platform sanitizes the data and maps it onto the digital replica so every animation, AR label, and camera angle is synchronized with what’s happening on the water. Cesium’s geospatial accuracy means AR overlays don’t rely on tracking the broadcast feed. When the environment is removed and replaced with live video, the overlays stay perfectly aligned, enabling broadcast‑quality XR even in chaotic conditions where drone restrictions, line of sight challenges, or hardware issues can disrupt traditional filming.

With all the resources available in the Unreal environment, broadcasters can provide viewers with a visually interesting and deeply informative video by cutting back and forth between a live camera feed of the race, the digital replica in Cesium for Unreal, and a hybrid AR view of the race with data on the RaceBirds’ telemetry.

BADASS provides AR overlays for broadcasts of races, like this race in Monaco. Courtesy BADASS. 

The Cesium replica of the race isn’t just for broadcasts. Fans who come to watch the E1 Series can also take part in the races themselves in a game simulator. Players pick a team and a RaceBird and try their hand at piloting through the course, using the same environment BADASS built in Cesium for Unreal to use in course explainers and live broadcasts of the race. For onsite attendees, these simulators fill downtime between races and deepen engagement. In the future, these environments will also be published as a game on Steam and other platforms, allowing fans to play at home.

“Cesium’s streaming and geospatial accuracy give us a single environment we can reuse across course explainers, AR broadcast graphics, and interactive experiences, which makes delivery faster and the output more consistent.”

BADASS Studios reuses the same Cesium for Unreal race venue for VR and AR broadcasts and for simulations. They bring their adaptable approach to multiple live events, as shown in this simulation of the FIA Extreme H World Cup in Qiddiya City, Saudi Arabia. Courtesy BADASS Studios. 

This multi-use approach—creating a single environment that can be reused in marketing, broadcasting, and games—is only possible because of Cesium’s geospatial accuracy and streaming efficiency. Such reusable content deployed in so many ways simplifies the process for E1, which can solve many needs with a single digital twin, and for BADASS, which maximizes the use of the assets it builds.

In addition to the E1 Series, BADASS Studios supports a number of events, including the FIA Extreme H World Cup, an off-road race of hydrogen powered SUVs, and FIM World Supercross Championship. With a scalable platform built on Cesium, they plan to expand into other sports and entertainment live events, giving viewers in any location an enhanced connection to real events.

To build a geospatially accurate environment you can deploy in numerous ways, try out Cesium for Unreal.

In January, we attended GeoBuiz in Denver and opened the call for presentations and early bird registration for the 2026 Cesium Developer Conference. Looking ahead, we’re thrilled to be a host of the 134th OGC Member meeting in Philadelphia in March. 

CesiumJS 1.138 is now available. Highlights of the release include:

Fixed jitter artifacts on Intel Arc GPUs. #12879 

Improved voxel memory usage by reworking Megatexture to use Texture3D. #12570 

Fixed multiple issues causing undefined pick results in 2D/CV scene modes. #13083 

Fixed label sizing for some fonts and characters. #9767 

Volumetric rendering with voxels in CesiumJS was optimized with WebGL2’s 3D Textures for reduced memory usage at runtime.

When adding a CesiumCartographicPolygon to the level via the Cesium panel, the polygon is now created in the current Editor view, rather than at the origin. 

Added ACesiumCartographicPolygon::SetPolygonPoints to shape a polygon spline from a list of positions in cartographic or Earth-Centered, Earth-Fixed coordinates. 

Re-enabled support for tileset water masks on macOS devices. 

In addition to the above, this release updates cesium-native from v0.56.0 to v0.57.0. See the changelog for a complete list of changes in cesium-native. 

Cesium for Unity v1.22.0 is now available. Highlights of this release include:

Fixed a bug that prevented CesiumGoogleMapTilesRasterOverlay from being added to a GameObject in more recent versions of Unity.  

Coming this week: The Design and Reality Tilers will now be packaged with the tilers and tools in the 3D Tiling Pipeline. Versions will be unified, and all tilers will be on v5.0.0. 

WorldLens uses Cesium for Unity to deliver high-performance, immersive VR experiences that stream global geospatial data to Meta Quest.

Blenheim Palace leveraged 3D Tiles created through the Cesium Design Tiler and Add-In for Autodesk Revit to create a digital twin in CesiumJS that has IoT integration to enable smart heritage conservation, predictive maintenance, and sustainability.

Blenheim Palace Performing Smart Conservation with Cesium

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.

In December, the team was in Orlando for I/ITSEC and Exton for our quarterly refactor. Then came all the jolly action with the Cesium-powered NORAD Tracks Santa app. 

Today, we opened the call for presentations for the 2026 Cesium Developer Conference. Submit your talk ideas, and we look forward to seeing you in June! 

CesiumJS 1.137 is now available. Highlights of the release include:

Fixes for positioning in workflows that delete and recreate labels. 

Fixes for texture coordinates in large billboard collections.

CesiumJS rendering a large collection of billboards with high precision, using data from the iTwin Feature Service.

Cesium for Unreal v2.22.0 is now available. Note that this release removes support for Unreal Engine 5.4; Unreal Engine 5.5 or later is required.

Other highlights of this release include:

Replaced the "Auto Fill" button on UCesiumFeaturesMetadataComponent with "Add Properties". This allows metadata properties and feature ID sets to be selectively added to the component, rather than adding them all in bulk. 

Added EnableDoubleSidedCollisions to ACesium3DTileset to allow intersections and collisions with geometry to also work when hitting "back" faces. 

Added an optional glTF model post-processing stage after the tile loading step to modify their models before they are displayed. 

Added support for refreshing Cesium ion login tokens after they expire and the refresh token is still valid. 

Fixed a material generation bug on UCesiumFeaturesMetadataComponent where user-made connections to If nodes were not preserved. 

Fixed deprecation warnings when compiling with Unreal Engine 5.5+ by replacing deprecated GetInputsView() calls with FExpressionInputIterator. 

This release also updates cesium-native from v0.55.0 to v0.56.0. See the changelog for a complete list of changes in cesium-native. 

A list of metadata properties available in the New York region of Cesium OSM Buildings.

Cesium for Unity v1.21.0 is now available. Highlights of this release include:

Setting CesiumGeoreference.ellipsoid at runtime will now correctly update the Georeference and associated transforms. 

Fixed a bug that could cause Cesium3DTileset::Update to be called more than once per frame in the Editor. 

Further improved stability when Unity reloads the AppDomain, such as when editing scripts or entering Play mode. 

In addition to the above, this release updates cesium-native from v0.55.0 to v0.56.0. See the changelog for a complete list of changes in cesium-native. 

Cesium for Omniverse v0.26.0 is now available. Highlights of this release include:

Fixed loading KTX2 textures with mipmaps.

Reduced memory usage when processing IFC files. 

Added support for nested IFC properties. 

(experimental) Added support for geospatially locating IFC exports from Archicad. 

Bringing Earth to the Treadmill with Cesium

Cesium Releases in May 2026

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

Cesium Releases in April 2026

Cesium Releases in March 2026

Creating an XR Connection to the E1 Series with Cesium for Unreal

Cesium Releases in February 2026