Cesium for Omniverse v0.25.0

Cesium for Unity Samples v1.17.0

CesiumJS 1.132

Cesium ion

In July, we highlighted the iTwin Activate cohort focused on Cesium and 3D Tiles, formally announced Cesium ion’s reality modeling and AI-powered analysis services, and posted the recorded sessions from the 2025 Cesium Developer Conference. 

2025 Cesium Developer Conference panel: Pragmatic Approach to Open Standards.

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 1.132 is now available. Highlights of the release include:

Fixes incorrect polygon culling in 2D scene mode. #1552 

Fixes material flashing when changing properties. #1640, #12716 

Fixed an issue where draped imagery on tilesets was not updated based on the visibility of the imagery layer. #12742 

Fixes an exception when removing a Gaussian splat tileset from the scene primitives when it has more than one tile. #12726 

Fixes rendering of Gaussian splats when they are scaled by the glTF transform, tileset transform, or model matrix. #12721, #12718 

Fixes label background translucency issue. #12673 

Fixes Gaussian splats incorrectly rendering when Cesium3DTileset.show is false. #12748 

Updated GPU vertex transformations to reduce precision errors. #4250 

Expand the CustomShader Sample to support real-time modification of CustomShader. #12702 

Added the ability to load a specific changeset for iTwin Mesh Exports using ITwinData.createTilesetFromIModelId. #12778 

Gaussian splats model sandcastle example rendered in CesiumJS.

Cesium for Unreal v2.18.0 is now available. Starting with this release, Unreal Engine v5.4+ is required, and Unreal Engine v5.3 is no longer supported.

Added the ability to load GeoJSON and render its lines and polygons draped over terrain or 3D Tiles. This is enabled by the new CesiumGeoJsonDocumentRasterOverlay component. 

Added support for querying metadata in glTF property attributes. 

Fixed a bug that caused raster overlays from Cesium ion, such as Bing Maps, to stop working after an hour or so. 

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

Roads in New South Wales, Australia, visualized via GeoJSON in Cesium for Unreal. Speed Zones dataset courtesy of Transport for New South Wales.

Cesium for Unity v1.17.0 is now available. Highlights of this release include:

Added support for Cesium3DTileset tile selection using orthographic views. 

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

An orthographic view of Center City Philadelphia, visualized with Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles in Cesium for Unity.

Reality modeling and analysis are available to all users as a tech preview. Share your feedback on the community forum. 

Improved rendering, scaling, and positioning of Gaussian splats. 

Update to using binary prefixes for file size abbreviations. Cesium ion has always computed sizes using base 2; this change adjusts the labeling to reflect this. 

Cesium ion Self-Hosted 1.7 is now available. 

The option to tile Gausian splats from the .ply format is now available to users. 

Added the ability to handle chunked asset uploads. 

The Administration panel now allows admins to undelete a user that has been marked for delete but not completely deleted yet by the maintenance script. 

The helm chart now allows users an option to delete the source directories of successful job if they please. 

The helm chart now allows users to mount their own external working directory volume in place of using scratch space on the node. 

Added support for serving WMTS format for imagery assets. 

Removed a spurious “file not found” warning. 

Fixed an issue where a subtree was not generated for single-tile tilesets. 

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

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

A March 2025 memo instructs United States Department of Defense (DOD) components to prioritize Other Transaction Authority agreements (OTAs) and Commercial Solutions Openings (CSOs) as preferred methods for acquiring software capabilities. A "non-traditional" government partner, Cesium has served Navy users via Undersea Technology Innovation Consortium (UTIC) OTA since 2019. 

Dave Sracic, Distinguished Software Engineer for Fleet Signatures Systems, Naval Surface Warfare Center Carderock Division, explained: “We got [changes] back into CesiumJS, upstream, open source version, which means we do not have to keep a Navy fork of that software. The open source community maintains those specific changes. We care deeply about those features and use them heavily. Now that they’re part of the master branch, with test cases, we have reasonable confidence they won’t die, and we don’t pay some kind of sustainment fee. This is what the DOD policy aspires to—the government contributing back to open source.” 

Stills from Cesium World Bathymetry video, showing possibilities of the dataset.

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

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

Introducing reality modeling in Cesium ion.

Reality Modeling in Cesium ion

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

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

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

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

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

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

Uploading existing 3D reality data to Cesium ion. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The 3D reality data analysis flow in Cesium ion.

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

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

Cesium ion analysis of a point cloud of Old City Philadelphia 

Old City Philadelphia Analysis

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

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

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

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

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.

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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

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

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

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

Expose iTwin Platform APIs and services through Cesium; 

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

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

Provide reusable and configurable user experience tools and widgets; and 

Improve learning material and ongoing maintenance. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reality analysis using AI feature detectors

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Expose iTwin Platform APIs and services through Cesium

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

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

Clash detection and review shown in iTwin.js. 

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

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

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

Improvements to AEC-to-3D Tiles workflows

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Adding high-resolution insets on the Moon. 

Introducing a planetary dataset for Mars. 

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

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

Provide reusable and configurable user experience tools and widgets

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

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

Improve learning material and ongoing maintenance

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cesium Roadmap for Bridging the Built and Natural Environment 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In May, we introduced 3D Tiles for Godot by Battle Road; explained why we use Iron Bank container images for software security in Cesium ion; attended GEOINT Symposium; announced the most recent Cesium Ecosystem Grants awardees; and turned the spotlight on the aerospace and defense, Cesium/iTwin/3DTiles, and market and education tracks at the Cesium Developer Conference. We look forward to connecting with the community at devcon in just a few weeks. (Have you registered?) 

The follow-up Cesium Ecosystem Grant to Garrett Johnson will focus on expanding the 3DTilesRendererJS project’s support for basic geospatial visualizations (topographic lines) and available data formats (TMS, QMesh) for Three.js. Pictured here is Mars.

Cesium Releases in August 2025

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

Cesium Releases in July 2025

Cesium Roadmap for Bridging the Built and Natural Environment

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

Cesium Releases in June 2025

Cesium ion Uses Iron Bank Container Images for Software Security