Cesium for Omniverse v0.25.0

Cesium for Unity Samples v1.16.2

CesiumJS 1.131

Cesium for Unreal

In June, we announced a geospatially accurate 3D Globe in QGIS supported by a Cesium Ecosystem Grant, shared our roadmap to seek your guidance as we bring iTwin digital twin capabilities to Cesium, enabled draping imagery layers on 3D Tiles in CesiumJS, and welcomed the community to Philadelphia for the first Cesium Developer Conference. 

The iconic red PSFS letters on top of the Loews Philadelphia Hotel went blue one night and green the next during the 2025 Cesium Developer Conference.

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 1.131 is now available. Highlights of the release include:

Added experimental support for loading 3D Tiles with Gaussian splats encoded with SPZ compression using the draft glTF extension. KHR_spz_gaussian_splats_compression in CesiumJS 1.130.1 #12582 

Added HeightReference to Cesium3DTileset.ConstructorOptions to allow clamping point features in 3D Tile vector data to terrain or 3D Tiles. #11710 

Added the ability to pass OffscreenCanvas & ImageBitmap directly to Material uniforms. #12558 

Fixed raymarching step size for cylindrical voxels. #12681 

Fixes handling of tileset modelMatrix changes for translations and rotations in GaussianSplatPrimitive. #12706 

Gaussian splats (left) compared to 3D Tiles Mesh (right) in CesiumJS. Try the Sandcastle.

Cesium for Unreal v2.17.0 is now available. This is the last release of Cesium for Unreal that will support Unreal Engine v5.3. Future versions will require Unreal Engine v5.4+.

Added a C++ and Blueprint API for loading and accessing GeoJSON data. 

Feature IDs that are encoded by UCesiumFeaturesMetadataComponent will now use a default null feature ID of -1 instead of 0. 

Materials generated by UCesiumFeaturesMetadataComponent now always check for null feature IDs, assuming a default value of –1. 

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

Landmarks in an area in Singapore, parsed from GeoJSON and visualized in Cesium for Unreal. Sourced from iTwin Reality Feature Service (support in progress).

Cesium for Unity v1.16.2 is now available. Highlights of this release include:

Fixed broken support for TRIANGLE_FAN primitives in tile meshes. 

Fixed an editor crash that occurred when any scale component on Cesium3DTileset was set to zero. 

Fixed a bug where CameraFlyToController, after the user interrupted a flight, would jump to the middle of the flight path immediately upon starting the next flight. 

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

Mesh reconstruction from photos is available as a technical preview. Upload geolocated photos and select the Photos (for 3D reconstruction) option. Read more. 

Added the ability to perform analysis on point clouds to produce classified point clouds. Try it with the Analyze button on the asset details panel. Read more. 

Gaussian splats is available as a technical preview. Upload a PLY file and enable the Gaussian splats toggle. Read more. 

Fixed a rare issue with tile subdivision that could cause unnecessarily deep tileset trees. 

Fixed an issue causing a crash for some models with no materials. 

Set the mipmap generation option to be off by default. 

Check the changelogs for the full list of updates for Cesium ion SaaS and Cesium ion Self-Hosted.

Cesium ion “city detector” analysis tool as seen in Cesium Stories.

To promote the adoption of a structural health monitoring system, earthquake engineering researcher Kensaku Kaneko is pioneering a new approach—visualizing building safety through 3D web GIS with CesiumJS. 

Hobu developed its browser-based Eptium viewer using CesiumJS to enable users to visualize and interact with massive point clouds and raster data. 

Nippon Koei uses Cesium ion and Cesium for Unreal, significantly streamlining the acquisition and processing of accurate geospatial context for a design area. 

HNTB’s Immersive Media Solutions team uses Cesium ion, Cesium for Unreal, Cesium for Unity, and Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles to help community stakeholders better understand proposed infrastructure projects and engage meaningfully in the approval process. 

When it comes to infrastructure investments, visualization transforms public engagement from abstract discussions to concrete decision-making. HNTB’s Immersive Media Solutions team uses Cesium ion, Cesium for Unreal, Cesium for Unity, and Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles to help community stakeholders better understand proposed infrastructure projects and engage meaningfully in the approval process. 

A flythrough of a proposed design to replace the Bourne Bridge was used in public outreach efforts as part of the Cape Cod Bridges Program. Courtesy HNTB. 

HNTB: Bourne Bridge

Founded in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1914, HNTB initially focused on designing railroad bridges. Today, the company offers comprehensive services in engineering, architecture, planning, and construction management, primarily focusing on transportation infrastructure. Their architectural services extend to designing and managing projects for public assembly facilities, including numerous prominent sports stadiums and arenas.  

“When presenting an infrastructure project proposal for public engagement, it’s crucial that local stakeholders and property owners understand where their property, building, or favorite park is located in relation to the proposal, and that the surrounding context is recognizable,” HNTB immersive media solutions manager Dave Willard said. 

Willard and his team create real-time interactive media to visualize and assess infrastructure project designs, from single highway interchanges to 30-mile road and rail corridors. They load a diverse range of 3D engineering and design models of roads, bridges, or rail networks—created in applications like OpenRoads, Revit, MicroStation, Civil3D, or SketchUp—directly into Unreal Engine or Unity. The team uses the Cesium for Unreal or Cesium for Unity plugins, depending on the project, and accesses Photorealistic 3D Tiles via Cesium ion to add real-world context, enriching project visualizations for public review and community engagement initiatives.  

Designed to deliver highly detailed and realistic data for immersive environments, Google Maps Platform's Photorealistic 3D Tiles enable immersive experiences that scale from individual buildings to entire cities. Photorealistic 3D Tiles leverage the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) community standard 3D Tiles format, created by Cesium, which performantly streams massive amounts of 3D geospatial data. 

Prior to adopting Cesium, providing accurate geospatial context for major projects was a significant time investment, requiring the team to manually model, texture, and detail existing buildings.   

“Now, we bring that data in from Cesium and use it as-is in many cases,” Willard explained. “It removes the headache on our end, allowing us to focus our time on visualizing the proposed project instead of the buildings that are already there.”   

HNTB's visualization team extended Cesium's open-source platform to vertically align long linear infrastructure models with the Earth's curvature. Courtesy HNTB.

This capability proved invaluable to HNTB during its work on a long highway corridor project in the southeastern United States. 

“Manually modeling existing buildings for contextual detail on long linear projects historically required over 1,000 hours of work,” Willard said. “Cesium reduces that time to between 200 and 300 hours." 

The extensibility and open-source foundation of Cesium enabled HNTB's visualization team to build a tool that addressed the challenge they faced in accurately aligning this 26-mile corridor model. Traditional engineering designs don't account for the Earth's curvature, leading to noticeable vertical discrepancies over long distances—in this case, the model floated about 80 feet above the earth at one end and dipped 80 below the other. 

HNTB developed a non-destructive mesh blending tool on top of Cesium that could automatically apply the necessary curvature to large, complex 3D models. This allowed them to continuously update design models in their Unity environment, with the tool automatically correcting for Earth's curvature, ensuring "ground truth accuracy" for their clients.  

“One of the really cool things about having Cesium is the ability to build other tools on top of it,” remarked Adam Liss, HNTB senior immersive media specialist. 

Willard's team, serving as a key consultant for the Massachusetts Department of Transportation on the Cape Cod Bridges Program, was tasked with presenting 10 different interchange configurations for public review. 

Traditionally, this would have necessitated creating numerous individual videos and renderings for each combination, making it difficult for the public to compare scenarios and provide feedback. Instead, Willard's team applied their Cesium-powered interactive media capabilities, so presenters were able to dynamically display and toggle between these different interchange options, with detailed surroundings the reviewers expected to see, in real time via pixel streams and locally-run applications during public meetings. 

HNTB’s team also built masking tools using Cesium. These tools enable them to overlay potential designs directly onto existing structures, making it easy for viewers to compare the past with the proposed future.

For a bridge proposal to link barrier islands along the Gulf Coast of Texas, HNTB integrated Cesium’s World Bathymetry data into their visualization. This addition helped stakeholders understand how underwater topography and the locations of historic shipwrecks impacted the busy shipping lanes beneath the proposed bridge design. “It’s important to be able to render this 2D-type information in a 3D context,” Liss explained. 

This streamlined process, powered by Cesium, enables quick visualization of design alternatives and facilitates efficient collection of public input to identify preferred designs for their projects. 

Innovation defines HNTB's 111-year legacy in infrastructure, a commitment clearly seen in their Immersive Media Solutions team's work to transform public engagement by making the abstract concrete. When it comes to Cesium, the team feels like they are just scratching the surface. “As we transition away from manual modeling of existing context, technologies like Cesium will continue to make our workflows much faster,” Willard said. 

Looking into the future, Willard’s sights are set on digital twin delivery, bridging the work between owner-operators and engineering firms.  

“The end goal isn't just about interactive real-time visualizations; it's transforming those visualizations into informational environments—digital twins,” Willard said. “Imagine delivering a complete football stadium or road corridor, complete with all its element-level metadata as a digital twin. That, to me, is a truly valuable deliverable for an engineering firm.” 

Bring accurate real-world context, like Photorealistic 3D Tiles, to your infrastructure projects with Cesium ion. 

HNTB Streamlines Infrastructure Project Visualization with Cesium 

都市開発や社会インフラ整備において、関係者間の認識のズレは大きな課題でした。特に、専門知識のない行政担当者や住民にとって、設計意図を正確に理解することは容易ではありません。その背景には、膨大なデータをどのように統合し、可視化し、合意形成を円滑に進めるかという長年の問題がありました。特に、リアルな背景データの作成は、従来膨大な時間とコストを要する作業でした。しかし、日本工営株式会社はこの課題を解決するためにCesium for Unrealを導入し、設計対象エリアに対する正確な地理空間背景データの取得・処理を大幅に効率化。その結果、関係者や意思決定者、住民がインフラ設計やシミュレーションをより容易に理解できるようになりました。

都市開発やインフラ計画において、設計対象エリアのみならず、周辺環境の再現が不可欠です。背景データがなければ、設計の影響を適切に評価できず、関係者間の共通認識が形成されにくくなります。しかし、正確な地理空間の背景データの作成は従来、非常に手間のかかる作業であり、他にも多くの課題がありました。

背景データ作成の負担：都市全体や広範囲の地形データを個別に作成する必要があり、多大な時間と労力を要していた。

データ統合の壁：DEMデータ、航空・衛星画像、点群データ、SfMメッシュ、BIM/CIMデータなど、多種多様なデータを手作業で統合する作業が必要だった。

リアルタイムレンダリングの限界：高精細な3Dモデルの処理が困難で、スムーズなシミュレーションが実現できなかった。

こうした課題を克服するため、日本工営はCesium ionとCesium for Unrealを活用し、背景データの作成コストを劇的に削減しました。

Cesium ionとCesium for Unrealによる背景データの革新

高品質な3D地理空間データを活用した、効率的な背景データ生成

以前は、設計対象エリア外の背景モデルを作成するために、手作業で航空測量データや点群データを取得し、3Dモデリングソフトウェアで調整する必要がありました。しかし、Cesium ionを利用することで、このプロセスが一変しました。Cesium Globeの3Dコンテンツやパートナーのデータから地形・建物・画像情報にアクセスすることで、ゼロからデータセットを構築する必要をなくしたのです。

Unreal Fest 2024 Tokyo 講演資料より抜粋　提供：日本工営株式会社

Cesium World Bathymetry を活用し、海底地形データをそのまま取り込むことで、港湾・沿岸開発の背景作成が簡単に。

Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles を適用することで、高精度な都市環境を手作業なしで背景データとして取得。

Bing Mapsの航空写真 + Cesium World Terrain を活用し、広範囲の地形情報を即座に統合。

Japan 3D Buildings は、国土交通省PLATEAUが提供する全国200を超える市区町村において、クリック一つでこれまで整備されたすべての建物データが利用可能。

Cesium ionのContent Data（衛星画像、3D建築データ、地形情報など）を利用することで、ゼロからデータを作成する手間を省き、高品質な背景データを短時間で取得可能。

これにより、日本工営では、背景データ作成にかかっていた膨大な工数を削減し、設計エリアのモデリングに集中できるようになりました。

Cesium ion導入による作業工数削減効果 - Unreal Fest 2024 Tokyo 講演資料より抜粋。提供：日本工営株式会社

Cesium ionを通じたUnreal Engineとのシームレスな統合

Cesium ionとCesium for Unreal pluginを活用することで、膨大な地理空間データをクラウドから直接ストリーミングし、Unreal Engine内でダイナミックに可視化が可能になりました。

3Dタイルの自動処理：Cesium ionのタイリングパイプラインを活用し、BIM/CIMデータを自動的に3Dタイル化。

リアルタイムストリーミング：Google Photorealistic 3D TilesやCesium World Terrain、測量で取得した地形のデータを動的に読み込み、必要に応じて表示。

データの軽量化とパフォーマンス向上：Cesium ion上で処理されたデータをCesium for Unrealを使用しUnreal Engineに取り込み、最適化された形でレンダリング。

住民説明会では、Cesium World TerrainやCesium ionに搭載されているPLATEA 3D都市モデルを活用し、設計対象箇所に密接に関連する都市の背景データを即座に表示。住民が自分の街の未来像を直感的に理解でき、説明の効率が向上しました。従来の住民説明会では、パースや平面配置図を使用しており、参加者が自ら頭の中で3次元空間を想像していましたが、この手法により、空間に対する正確な共通認識を得た状態で議論を行うことができました。

水辺空間開発プロジェクトでの活用例　提供：日本工営株式会社

水辺空間開発プロジェクトでの活用例　提供：日本工営株式会社

Using Cesium in waterfront development projects. Courtesy Nippon Koei Co., Ltd.

Nippon Koei waterfront development projects

Bing画像 + Cesium World Terrainを利用し、川の周辺環境を詳細に再現。流況シミュレーションデータと組み合わせることで、河川の状態や氾濫リスクの可視化が飛躍的に向上しました。河川の流れの様子や都市の氾濫シミュレーションをCesiumの各種データと重ね合わせることで、場所に対する理解、リスクの理解が大幅に向上します。流況シミュレーションをゲームエンジンで表現する取り組みは進めていましたが、場所の理解につながる周辺環境の際現には時間がかかっていました。これがCesium ionとCesium for Unrealを用いることで大幅に効率化できるようになりました。

河川管理プロジェクトの成果例　出典：日本工営株式会社

Using Cesium for river management project outcomes. Courtesy Nippon Koei Co., Ltd.

Nippon Koei river management project

Cesium World Bathymetryを活用し、震源データを海底地形と統合。日本工営は、これにより、震源位置や震源域の変化、海底地形との関係性など防災や地球科学の観点で有用な可視化を実現しました。非常に多くの地震が日本全国で発生していることを立体的に見ることは、防災教育の観点でも重要な資料として利用できると考えられます。

2020年～2022年3月までの震源位置を３Ｄデータの動画で見せたもの（提供：日本工営株式会社）

2020年～2022年3月までの震源位置を３Ｄデータの動画で見せたもの（提供：日本工営株式会社）

3D visualization content of the earthquake epicenter. Courtesy Nippon Koei Co., Ltd.

Nippon Koei earthquake epicenter

上の動画のコンテンツを制作した日本工営の佐藤隆洋氏は、以下のように語ります。「日本ではプレート沿いや断層沿いに発生する地震が多く、震源位置を3次元で表現した見せ方でも、関連性が浮かび上がってきます。そこで2020年～2022年3月までの震源位置を３Ｄデータの動画で見れるように作成したのが上の動画コンテンツです。

一方で、プレート活動により発生する地震とプレート活動で形成された海底地形の関係性の理解まではできません。そこで、Cesium ionとCesium for Unreal、およびCesium ionのworld Bathymetryを使用して、震源の位置と海底地形の関係や、地震の発生状況を時系列で表現する取り組みを行いました。それが、2024年8月に日向灘で起きた地震を可視化した次のコンテンツになります。この地震では南海トラフ地震臨時情報（巨大地震注意）が発表されています。このコンテンツでは、地震の発生場所はどこか、発生場所は移動しているのかなど、海底地形と同時に表示することで現象の理解を深めることができたと考えています。」

（2024年8月8日の日向灘の地震：8月8日に日向灘を震源とするM7.1,最大震度6弱の地震が発生。このコンテンツは、その地震をUnrealEngineとCesium ionを活用して可視化し、震源の位置と海底地形の関係や、地震の発生状況を時系列で表現したもの。Cesium World Bathymetryを利用。 動画提供：日本工営株式会社、 2024年8月6日～17日の震源データ出典：気象庁震源リスト）

地震の震源データ可視化プロジェクトの成果例　提供：日本工営株式会社

2020年～2022年3月までの震源位置を３Ｄデータの動画で見せたもの（提供：日本工営株式会社）

A 3D visualization powered by Cesium, illustrating the August 8, 2024 Hyūga-nada earthquake’s epicenter, seabed topography, and seismic timeline. Courtesy Nippon Koei Co., Ltd.

Nippon Koei earthquake

土砂災害は、大雨や地震などにより発生し大きな被害を生じさせます。どういったメカニズムで土砂災害が発生しているのかの理解は、対策を考えるうえでも重要になります。そしてここでも、土砂災害が発生している場所と周辺の関係性の理解が重要になります。Cesium for UnrealとCesium ionに登録した詳細な地形データやCesium World Terrainを活用し、高精度な地形データを取得。土砂崩れの3次元シミュレーションと合成することで、どういった現象がどこで発生したのかの理解が容易になっています。

土砂災害シミュレーション可視化の成果例　提供：日本工営株式会社

土砂災害シミュレーション可視化の成果例　提供：日本工営株式会社

Visualization results from landslide disaster simulation. Courtesy Nippon Koei Co., Ltd.

Nippon Koei landslide simulation

Cesium ionの活用により、日本工営は以下の大きなメリットを得ました。

各種データの重ね合わせの効率化：Cesium ionを利用することで詳細な測量データや各種モデルの地理的座標合わせの効率化が図られました。

背景モデル作成の時間削減：従来の手作業による背景作成が不要になり、設計業務に注力できるようになりました。

プロジェクトのスピード向上：背景作成がゼロになったことで、設計や解析により集中できるようになりました。

合意形成の迅速化：高精度な背景データを即座に表示できるため、関係者全員が直感的に理解できるようになりました。

日本工営は、Cesium for Unreal、Cesium ionの活用をさらに拡大し、スマートシティやデジタルツインの導入を推進。今後は、ゲーミフィケーションの要素を取り入れ、市民参加型の都市計画やインフラ管理を実現していく予定です。

高品質な3D地理空間データで変わる未来のインフラ設計

Cesium ionとCesium for Unrealの活用により、日本工営は、インフラ設計の大幅な効率化と高精度な可視化とシミュレーションを実現しました都市開発や社会インフラ整備の分野において、より正確でリアルな3D空間を提供し、リソースを最適に活用するために、ぜひCesium ionアカウントに登録してください。

Nippon Koei Transforms Infrastructure with Cesium for Unreal

In urban development and social infrastructure projects, discrepancies in understanding among stakeholders have long been a significant challenge. For government officials and residents without specialized knowledge, accurately grasping the intent behind a design is not always straightforward. At the heart of this challenge lies the need to effectively integrate vast amounts of data, visualize it clearly, and facilitate smooth consensus-building.

Particularly, creating realistic background data has traditionally been a labor-intensive and costly process. To address this, Nippon Koei began using Cesium ion and Cesium for Unreal, significantly streamlining the acquisition and processing of accurate geospatial context for a design area. As a result, collaborating stakeholders, decision-makers, and residents are more easily able to comprehend infrastructure designs and simulations.

Recreating not only the design area but also its surrounding environment is crucial in urban development and infrastructure planning. Without accurate background data, it becomes difficult to properly assess the impact of a design, making it harder for stakeholders to establish a common understanding. Creating this accurate geospatial context has traditionally been a time-consuming and labor-intensive process, accompanied by several key challenges:

The burden of background data creation: Large-scale terrain and city models had to be manually created, requiring extensive time and effort.

Challenges in data integration: Combining multiple data formats—such as DEM, aerial and satellite imagery, point cloud data, SfM meshes, and BIM/CIM data—often required manual adjustments.

Limitations in real-time rendering: Processing high-resolution 3D models was computationally demanding, making smooth simulation and real-time visualization difficult.

To overcome these challenges, Nippon Koei adopted Cesium ion and Cesium for Unreal, significantly reducing the cost and time required for background data creation.

Revolutionizing background data with Cesium ion and Cesium for Unreal

Leveraging curated 3D content for seamless background data generation

Previously, creating models for areas surrounding the core design zone required manually acquiring aerial survey data, processing point cloud data, and refining models using 3D modeling software. Nippon Koei uses Cesium ion to access terrain, buildings, and imagery from Cesium Globe 3D Content and partner data, eliminating the need to build datasets from scratch.

Datasets available via Cesium ion. Excerpt from presentation materials at Unreal Fest 2024 Tokyo. (Courtesy of Nippon Koei Co., Ltd.)

Cesium World Bathymetry enables direct integration of seabed terrain data, simplifying background creation for port and coastal development projects.

Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles provide detailed urban environments, eliminating the need for manual modeling of background data.

Bing Maps Aerial imagery + Cesium World Terrain allows for instant integration of large-scale terrain information.

Japan 3D Buildings allows users to access building data with one click from over 200 municipalities nationwide from PLATEAU (provided by the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism).


With Cesium ion, Nippon Koei has drastically reduced the labor previously required for surrounding geospatial data creation, allowing engineers to focus on modeling the actual design area.

Impact of Cesium ion on reducing workload. What used to take 20-40 hours now takes just 1 with Cesium. Excerpt from presentation materials at Unreal Fest 2024 Tokyo. (Courtesy of Nippon Koei Co., Ltd.)

With Cesium ion and the Cesium for Unreal plugin, vast amounts of geospatial data can be streamed directly from the cloud, enabling dynamic visualization in Unreal Engine with high efficiency.

Automated 3D tiling: The Cesium ion tiling pipeline allows BIM/CIM data to be converted into 3D Tiles without manual intervention.

Real-time streaming: Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles, Cesium World Terrain, and survey-based terrain datasets can be dynamically loaded and displayed as needed.

Optimized performance: Cesium ion processes data efficiently, allowing seamless integration and rendering of optimized data within Unreal Engine.

During a public consultation meeting, Cesium World Terrain and PLATEAU 3D city models available on Cesium ion were used to instantly visualize urban background data closely related to the design area. Residents were able to intuitively grasp the future vision of their city, significantly improving communication and efficiency in the presentation.

Previously, such meetings relied on static perspective drawings and site plans, requiring attendees to mentally reconstruct 3D spaces. However, with this new approach, discussions took place with a shared and accurate spatial understanding, eliminating interpretation gaps and improving decision-making processes.

Using Cesium in waterfront development projects. Courtesy Nippon Koei Co., Ltd.

Nippon Koei used Bing Maps Aerial imagery and Cesium World Terrain and have achieved a highly detailed reproduction of the river’s surrounding environment. When combined with flow simulation data, the visualization of river conditions and flood risks has improved dramatically. Overlaying river flow patterns and urban flood simulations with various Cesium datasets significantly enhances spatial understanding and risk awareness. While they had been working on visualizing flow simulations using game engines, reproducing the surrounding environment to support spatial understanding used to be time-consuming. This process has now been greatly streamlined through the use of Cesium ion and Cesium for Unreal.

3D visualization content of the earthquake epicenter. Courtesy Nippon Koei Co., Ltd.

This video content visualizes the hypocenter locations of earthquakes that occurred between 2020 and March 2022 using 3D data. In Japan, many earthquakes occur along tectonic plate boundaries and fault lines, and by presenting the hypocenters in three dimensions, these correlations become more apparent. However, this method alone does not provide a clear understanding of the relationship between earthquakes caused by plate activity and the seafloor topography shaped by that same activity.

To address this, Nippon Koei used Cesium for Unreal, Cesium ion, and Cesium World Bathymetry to visualize the relationship between hypocenter locations and seafloor features, as well as to show the progression of seismic activity over time. This led to the creation of new content visualizing the earthquake that occurred off the coast of Hyuga-nada in August 2024. In this case, an Emergency Nankai Trough Earthquake Information (warning of a potential megathrust earthquake) was issued.

By displaying the location and movement of the earthquake in conjunction with the seafloor topography, this content helped deepen understanding of the phenomena.

A 3D visualization powered by Cesium, illustrating the August 8, 2024 Hyūga-nada earthquake’s epicenter, seabed topography, and seismic timeline. Courtesy Nippon Koei Co., Ltd.

On August 8, 2024, a magnitude 7.1 earthquake struck the Hyūga-nada Sea, registering a ​maximum seismic intensity of lower 6 on the Japanese scale. This content illustrates the relationship between the earthquake's epicenter and the seabed topography, as well as the chronological progression of the seismic events. Nippon Koei used Cesium World Bathymetry for geospatial context. Seismic data source: Japan Meteorological Agency earthquake list from August 6-17, 2024.

Landslides can occur due to heavy rain, earthquakes, and other natural events, often resulting in significant damage. Understanding the mechanisms behind how landslides occur is essential when considering effective countermeasures. In addition, it is crucial to understand the relationship between the locations where landslides occur and their surrounding environments.

Using Cesium for Unreal along with high-resolution terrain data uploaded to Cesium ion, the Nippon Koei team generated a high-fidelity mountain landscape to support 3D landslide simulations.

By integrating real-world elevation data and erosion models, researchers and engineers can better understand how landslides develop and are able to predict potential high-risk areas.

Visualization results from landslide disaster simulation. Courtesy Nippon Koei Co., Ltd.

By adopting Cesium ion, Nippon Koei now has:

Efficient data integration: Cesium ion streamlined the alignment of survey datasets and 3D models with accurate geospatial positioning.

Reduced background model creation time: Manual background creation was eliminated, allowing greater focus on core design and analysis tasks.

Accelerated project timelines: With accurate geospatial context readily available, engineers and planners are able to work more efficiently.

Faster consensus building: High-precision models of surrounding areas allow all stakeholders to immediately grasp key project aspects, leading to more effective discussions and approvals.

Nippon Koei plans to further expand its use of Cesium for Unreal and Cesium ion, driving advancements in smart city development and digital twin technology.

By incorporating elements of gamification, the company aims to promote more interactive, community-driven urban planning and infrastructure management.

Transforming infrastructure design with curate 3D content

By utilizing Cesium ion and Cesium for Unreal, Nippon Koei has significantly improved the efficiency of infrastructure design, enhancing both visualization and simulation capabilities for its users.
To provide more accurate and realistic 3D spaces and optimize resources in urban development and social infrastructure maintenance, sign up for a Cesium ion account.

日本工営 - Cesium for Unrealで描くインフラ革命

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. 

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