Cesium for Omniverse v0.25.0

Cesium for Unity Samples v1.20.0

CesiumJS 1.136

CesiumJS

This year, NORAD Tracks Santa turns 70.  

Its origin story is as mythical as Santa himself: A 1955 Sears ad advertised a Santa hotline. A single number was misprinted, leading to a call to the Continental Air Defense Command (CONAD) Center in search of Santa Claus. The rest is history, with North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) taking over responsibility from CONAD in 1958. Over the years, the Santa-tracking process has become more elaborate, including visualizing the jolly old elf’s real-time location in 3D with CesiumJS. 

Each year, NORAD estimates, the hotline receives more than 380,000 calls to the call center at Peterson Space Force Base in Colorado Springs, and the NORAD Tracks Santa website gets visitors from over 200 countries.  

Cesium is proud to have been a part of the program since 2012.  

NORAD Tracks Santa 2025

 Tracking such a magical feat requires serious coordination and cooperation.  

The effort includes several systems that offer a real-time snapshot of Santa’s whereabouts:  

Radar: The North Warning System, a powerful radar system with 47 installations across North America, is the first to detect Santa's departure from the North Pole.  

Satellites: NORAD uses a network of satellites in geosynchronous orbit to track Santa.  

Santa Cams: A network of high-speed digital cameras, strategically placed around the world, captures images and videos of Santa and his sleigh.  

Fighter jets: Canadian and American NORAD pilots have the unique honor of escorting Santa for a portion of his journey. 

Kris Kringle takes flight over Japan in the NORAD Tracks Santa app.

Here’s a look under the hood at how Cesium helps bring this experience to life: We combine 3D terrain, high-resolution satellite imagery, a NASA star map, a 3D model of Santa’s sleigh, and more in CesiumJS for efficient, accurate streaming on the web.  The lighting is dynamic, reflecting the position of the sun throughout December 24.  

Plus we receive and integrate real-time positional data from NORAD's tracking systems to make sure you know where The Big Guy is at any moment. Cesium enables features like camera flights that smoothly transition to different locations and billboards that provide information about the places Santa has visited. You can take a deeper look at the technology here.  

We look forward to our continued role in this heartwarming tradition that brings joy to millions.    

Track all the jolly action on December 24 at the Official NORAD Tracks Santa website. 

NORAD Tracks Santa: A Cesium-Powered Christmas Tradition 

CesiumJS forms the foundation of Virtual City Systems’ open, scalable urban planning tools. Virtual City Systems (VCS) has built its modular software suite around CesiumJS to help cities across Europe visualize, analyze, and manage urban spaces in 3D.

Potential future development in Berlin, Germany, shown as architectural data surrounded by a 3D mesh of existing buildings. Courtesy Virtual City Systems.

VCS, a Cesium Certified Developer, is committed to advancing open tech ecosystems for municipal planning and administration. They were one of the first companies to help promote 3D Tiles as an OGC community standard, and they released VC Map as open source in 2021. This move accelerated adoption and empowered cities to customize and extend the platform freely.

3D visualization of a weather sensor in Memmingen, Germany, along with its real-time temperature and humidity data. Courtesy Virtual City Systems.

A web-based urban twin viewer powered by CesiumJS, VC Map is at the heart of VCS's platform. Cesium allows VC Map to render their users’ large-scale geospatial datasets—terrain, CityGML models, mesh data, and point clouds—efficiently into the browser, enabling smooth, interactive city models for strategic planning and public engagement. VC Map offers both high performance and long-term digital sovereignty for governments.

“With Cesium, we can visualize massive, complex urban datasets responsively and intuitively—and build custom tools on top of a robust, well-supported platform. As a Cesium Certified Developer, we’re proud to promote Cesium as a foundation for transparent, standards-based 3D solutions in the public sector.”

 – Claus Nagel, Managing Director & CTO, Virtual City Systems

3D visualization of environmental effects of planned buildings in Rosenheim, Germany, showing nighttime wind speeds (left) and summer heat stress (right). Courtesy Virtual City Systems.

VC Map can be extended with a number of modular software solutions. One of the most compelling is VC Solar, a 3D solar potential analysis tool. Built on CesiumJS, VC Solar allows both professionals and citizens to explore rooftop solar viability in 3D.

Measuring solar potential in Lüdenscheid, Germany. This visualization uses color on CityGML buildings to visualization annual global radiation. Users can select a single surface to view a graph showing monthly irradiation. Courtesy Virtual City Systems.

Users can assess energy yield, CO₂ savings, and financial feasibility using VCS’s custom sun model and ray-tracing algorithms. These calculations can be run citywide in the backend or interactively in the browser thanks to Cesium’s efficient rendering and extensibility.

Analyzing solar potential in the municipality of Vaterstetten, Germany, with the VC Solar App. Courtesy Virtual City Systems.

VC Solar, developed by Virtual City Systems and built on CesiumJS, allows both professionals and citizens to explore rooftop solar viability in 3D

VC Solar

Virtual City Systems is able to deliver high-performance 3D visualization and extensibility because of Cesium’s commitment to openness. Whatever your industry, CesiumJS gives you the foundation to create scalable, transparent, and customizable solutions. Explore bringing 3D visualizations in the browser to your users with open source CesiumJS, and learn more about our open standards work.

Virtual City Systems Advocates Open Source for Urban Digital Twins

Last month we attended both FOSS4G NA and the LSAS Aerospace and Defense Workshop, where we presented and met with the community. And we’re currently at I/ITSEC! Come by to meet with our team and see demos curated specifically for the modeling, simulation, and training community.

We’ve also welcomed new team members, including Don McCurdy, creator of glTF Transform and glTF.report. We shared his recent conversation with Sean Lilley, our lead engineer behind 3D Tiles, discussing how we can advance 3D Tiles and glTF in an open ecosystem.

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 1.136 is now available. Highlights of the release include:

Fixed depth testing bug with billboards and labels clipping through models #13012

Billboards using imageSubRegion now render as expected. #12585

Improved scaling of SVGs in billboards #13020

Fixed unexpected outline artifacts around billboards #13038

Added scene.pickAsync for non GPU blocking picking using WebGL2 #12983

Improves performance of terrain picks via new terrain picking quadtrees #8481

This month we made performance improvements in CesiumJS for terrain picking by using a quadtree acceleration structure.

Cesium for Unreal v2.21.1 is now available. Note that this is the last release of Cesium for Unreal that will support Unreal Engine v5.4. Future versions will require Unreal Engine v5.5+.

Fixed a bug that prevented UCesiumPrimitiveFeaturesBlueprintLibrary::GetPrimitiveFeatures from retrieving the features of instanced meshes.

In addition, this release updates cesium-native from v0.54.0 to v0.55.0. 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

Cesium for Unity v1.20.0 is now available. Importantly, this month we added a highly requested feature: experimental support for web builds!

Other highlights of this release include:

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

Fixed incorrect association of the iOS libraries with the iOS platform, which could cause errors when packaging for other platforms.

Exceptions thrown by delegates implemented in native code are now correctly propagated back to the managed caller. Previously, this scenario could cause crashes and undefined behavior.

Delegate wrappers for native functions now use SafeHandle to ensure the native function will not be destroyed by the garbage collector while it is running.

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

Added Azure Maps 2D imagery assets as a Technology Preview.

Cesium ion now supports setting an asset's height for individual slides in Stories.

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

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

Forensic Rock uses Cesium for Unreal and Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles to rapidly reconstruct accident scenes with high-fidelity geospatial data for legal visualizations.

Forensic Rock Accelerates Accident Reconstruction with Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles

In October, we introduced Google Maps 2D Tiles in Cesium ion and had a busy month with events: Intergeo, FOSS4G Japan, AUSA, YII, ArchiFuture, and the 133rd OGC Member Meeting. This week we’re at FOSS4G NA in Reston, Virginia—join us at our talks and stop by the Cesium table to chat with the team.  

The stunning mountains of Kauai, Hawaii, visualized with Cesium World Terrain and the Google Maps 2D Satellite asset from Cesium ion.

CesiumJS 1.135 is now available. Highlights of the release include:

Added experimental support for loading 3D Tiles as terrain, via Cesium3DTilesTerrainProvider. See the PR for limitations on the types of 3D Tiles that can be used. #12296 

Added support for EXT_mesh_primitive_edge_visibility glTF extension. #12765 

Improved performance of scene.drillPick (#12916), removing primitives (#3018) and terrain Quadtree handling of custom data. (#12907) 

Removed support for the KHR_spz_gaussian_splats_compression extension in favor of the latest 3D Gaussian splatting extensions for glTF, KHR_gaussian_splatting and KHR_gaussian_splatting_compression_spz_2. Please re-tile existing Gaussian splatting 3D Tiles. #12837 

This release contained a number of community contributions, including three from user Beilinson. If you’re interested in helping too, check out our contributors guide. 

Sandcastle has been updated at https://sandcastle.cesium.com!

glTF model demonstrating the EXT_mesh_primitive_edge_visibility extension in CesiumJS. Customization of edge colors will come in a future release.

Cesium for Unreal v2.21.0 is now available. Highlights of this release include:

Added ICesium3DTilesetLifecycleEventReceiver interface, allowing applications to receive callbacks when a material is instanced, when a tile changes visibility, when a tile is unloaded, etc. 

Fixed a bug where CesiumCreditSystem would not filter out empty credits, resulting in duplicate on-screen delimiters. 

Improved CesiumGeoJsonRasterOverlay’s support for polygons with holes and for datasets with geometry on both sides of the antimeridian. 

Infrared weather data across North America overlaid on satellite imagery from Microsoft Azure.

Cesium for Unity v1.19.0 is now available. Highlights of this release include:

Added CesiumGoogleMapTilesRasterOverlay to stream imagery from Google Maps. 

Added CesiumAzureMapsRasterOverlay to stream imagery from Microsoft Azure. 

Added assetOptions to CesiumIonRasterOverlay to pass JSON-string options to Cesium ion as it accesses an asset. 

Traffic in Philadelphia, PA, USA, visualized over a roadmap layer from Microsoft Azure alongside Cesium OSM Buildings.

Cesium ion now keeps track of which user created a story or uploaded an asset when that user is acting as a member of a Team account. 

Cesium ion now allows users to copy assets and stories between accounts to which they have access, such as from their individual Community account to a Team account. 

In Cesium Stories, added a feature to clip the terrain around a model. 

Added support for spherical harmonics when viewing Gaussian splat assets. 

Added support for tracking the creator of an asset and a story. 

Fixed an issue in reality tiler that could cause incorrect materials to be mapped to meshes when loading OBJ files. 

Fixed an issue where repositioning an asset would cause the re-archive process to fail. 

Fixed a bug with 3D Tiles imports from Microsoft Azure. 

Fixed an issue that could cause models with multiple sets of texture coordinates to be subdivided more than necessary. 

We added a feature to Cesium Stories to clip the terrain around a model.

In November 2025, we added a feature to Cesium Stories to clip the terrain around a model. 

Clip Terrain in Cesium Stories

Terradepth's AUVs collect vast amounts of 3D seabed data hosted on Cesium ion Self-Hosted and streamed to its CesiumJS-powered app, Absolute Ocean.

Glider Sim uses Cesium for Unity and Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles to deliver a globally immersive and highly realistic VR flight experience for both casual explorers and professional pilots.

About 25% of the global seafloor has been mapped in high resolution, according to NOAA, leaving a lot of work to be done. It’s not always practical or safe for humans to be involved, and that’s where Terradepth comes in: its autonomous underwater vehicles collect vast amounts of 3D seabed data hosted on Cesium ion Self-Hosted and streamed to its CesiumJS-powered app, Absolute Ocean. 

Terradepth cuts the seafloor-to-browser process from weeks to days. Courtesy Terradepth.

Terradepth Absolute Ocean Platform featuring Cesium Tilers

Traditionally, sending out a crew, collecting data, manually processing it, and making it available to users took several weeks. Using machines for dangerous, repeatable work, processing and sharing data where it’s captured, and employing people for analysis cuts the seafloor-to-browser process to days. 

Terradepth has been using Cesium since Absolute Ocean’s development and release in 2022. Absolute Ocean users collect and manage their data securely so they can recognize geographic physical features, identify human-made objects like sunken wrecks or unexploded ordnance, and observe change over time beneath the waves in immersive 3D. Hydrographers in academia, infrastructure, and national security rely on this growing collection of undersea geospatial data for better, faster decisions, with nearly immediate access to interactive data instead of a static slide or hard drive transfers. 

Skellig Michael, Ireland, in Absolute Ocean. Courtesy Terradepth.

Detail in ocean data varies: 500 m resolution from satellite altimetry, 50-100 m resolution from a ship, and 5 cm resolution from a robot near the seafloor, where human safety is questionable or even impossible. Terradepth’s AUVs use multibeam sonar, magnetometers, and more to collect terabytes of data. More detail means more data, and Terradepth uses Cesium to get it to users efficiently and securely.  

With Cesium ion Self-Hosted, Terradepth stores massive point clouds, GeoTIFFs, and other data types; tiles the point clouds into 3D Tiles; and streams them to Absolute Ocean, which is built on CesiumJS, for sharing with a broad research community or smaller set of decision-makers. Cesium ion Self-Hosted enables Absolute Ocean’s processing and sharing at the edge and supports data residency requirements. In addition to its detailed seabed data, Terradepth accesses Cesium World Terrain and Bing Maps Aerial imagery for accurate geospatial context above sea level. 

“Terradepth collects terabytes of data from the ocean. The sheer size meant customers used to wait weeks or months for their data. But with Absolute Ocean using Cesium Tilers at the edge we can let them see it comparatively instantly—with an intuitive, immersive, and three-dimensional user interface,” said Andrew Lunstad, Terradepth CTO.  

Watch Andrew Lunstad's 2025 Cesium Developer Conference talk to learn more about why Terradepth deploys Cesium ion Self-Hosted.

Developers and the Open Geospatial Ecosystem

Comprehensive, collaborative seafloor data becomes insight into one of the least explored parts of our planet. 

Learn more about hosting, tiling, and streaming massive datasets in your own environment to process at the edge and meet strict security requirements.  

Terradepth Processes Seafloor Data at the Edge with Cesium ion Self-Hosted 

In September, we released Cesium Mars, highlighted MicroStation’s 3D Tiles support and Cesium Native integration, and announced participants in the iTwin Activate cohort focusing on Cesium and 3D Tiles. We also attended the GeoGov Summit and welcomed Khronos members to Philadelphia for the F2F meeting. 

Cesium Mars is a 3D Tileset to enable developers, researchers, and mission planners to create visualizations and simulations of the Red Planet. 

Cesium Mars

CesiumJS 1.134 is now available. Highlights of the release include:

Added Google2DImageryProvider to load imagery from Google Maps. #12913 

Converted voxel raymarching to eye coordinates to fix precision issues in large datasets. #12061 

Fixed vertical misalignment of glyphs in labels with small fonts. #8474 

Fixed flickering artifact in Gaussian splat models caused by incorrect sorting results. #12662 

Sandcastle has been updated at https://sandcastle.cesium.com! The legacy Sandcastle app will remain available through November 3, 2025. 

Cesium for Unreal v2.20.0 is now available. Highlights of this release include:

Added support for rendering glTFs with line primitives. 

Added UCesiumGoogleMapTilesRasterOverlay. 

Added AssetOptions property to UCesiumIonRasterOverlay. 

In addition to the above, this release updates cesium-native from v0.51.0 to v0.52.0. See the changelog for a complete list of changes in cesium-native. 

The Google Maps attribution requirements were updated to use the "Google Maps" logo instead of the "Google" logo. Cesium ion and Cesium clients now use the Google Maps logo. If your application includes its own logic for the inclusion of the logo rather than using a logo provided by Cesium, see Google Maps' documentation for guidance about whether your application needs to be changed. 

Support for spherical harmonics for Gaussian splats. 

v1.7.1 is now available, with minor bug fixes. 

Fixed an issue that could cause incorrect materials to be mapped to meshes when loading OBJ files.

Fix export issues for some elements in Revit 2026. 

Fix incorrect transforms for some exported subcomponent elements. 

Support for Mars data added to imagery-tiler, terrain-tiler, and quantizedmeshto3dtilesconverter.

point-cloud-tiler handles PLY files with any number of comments now.

point-cloud-tiler fixed issue where in certain cases when using draco compression with .pnts output could result in batch table data not being written.

imagery-tiler added TileJSON format support.

For years, Propeller has been using CesiumJS to visualize drone-captured surveys of earthworks, quarries, mines, and waste management sites. Propeller recently got an upgrade when its team incorporated Cesium’s Design Tiler into the platform. 

For Propeller’s users, streaming IFC files as 3D Tiles means a faster, higher quality experience. They can analyze large files, like viewing cross sections of this IFC model. Courtesy Propeller.

Large scale projects require massive coordinated efforts from many people across many businesses, whether that’s grading hundreds of acres for new suburbs, laying thousands of miles of pipelines, or hauling tens of thousands of cubic yards of dirt from quarries. Even minor errors can be costly, and sharing a common ground between the many teams involved is critical.  

Propeller supports users working at large scale sites: quarries, mines, earthworks, waste management, etc. Courtesy Propeller.

For users like these, Propeller provides the tools to perform frequent accurate drone surveys, process that data, and visualize the site. When this isn’t frequent enough, DirtMate brings near-real-time data into the mix. Propeller’s platform gives users an intuitive 3D model that’s recent, realistic, and accurate, so they can spot safety hazards, track earthworks progress, and measure reality against design plans to make calculated operational decisions around material, labor, and equipment needs. 

Propeller’s users perform drone scans of their sites and then visualize those scans in 3D with CesiumJS. Now, with support for IFC files as 3D Tiles, they’re able to compare designs against reality. Courtesy Propeller.

The heart of Propeller’s visualization is CesiumJS. Propeller was an early adopter of Cesium: for years they’ve been using Cesium’s open source software to visualize drone-captured surveys of earthworks, quarries, mines, and waste management sites. Propeller’s commitment to accuracy—reliably achieving geospatial accuracy within 3 cm—has made their platform trusted by professional surveyors. The sophisticated tooling they’ve brought into their platform, which they put into a simple form factor, makes advanced analysis accessible to anyone involved in the project, regardless of technical background.

Propeller users can see their project in accurate 3D. For pipelines, electric utilities, railways, and other long linear assets, the geospatial coordinate system in CesiumJS renders designs aligned with real-world curvature. Courtesy Propeller.

Propeller recently got an upgrade when its team incorporated Cesium’s Design Tiler into the platform. The Design Tiler takes complex BIM data, like the Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) open standard, and tiles it into 3D Tiles for efficient streaming. These improvements allow users to look at much more granular data, on a much larger scale, faster than ever.

"Integrating the Cesium Design Tiler into our platform has revolutionized our support for BIM for all our customers.” 

—Harry Morris, software engineer, Propeller

3D Tiles has made IFC files from one of the most cumbersome to one of the most performant file types on Propeller’s platform. This video shows first the original solution of an IFC model loaded in Propeller’s platform and then the same model tiled as 3D Tiles. Courtesy Propeller.

A visual of IFC files loaded in Propeller's platform before 3D Tiles and after tiling.

IFC files in Propeller before and after 3D Tiles

The tiling pipeline transformed IFC files—once cumbersome and limited to 300 MB—into one of the most performant file types on Propeller’s platform, which now supports IFC files up to 2 GB. This 6–7x increase in file size capacity came with dramatic performance gains. 

“For our customers with the most demanding projects, framerates are up anywhere from 20% to 170%, and memory usage has been drastically reduced, with our most demanding models seeing a 60x reduction in memory usage and similar reductions in data transfer," said Harry Morris, Propeller software engineer.

When streamed as 3D Tiles, IFC files retain all metadata: an inspector can click on an individual bolt in a bridge and see its size, manufacturer, the contractor responsible for installing it—whatever the users have uploaded. Courtesy Propeller.

Bringing Cesium’s Design Tiler into the platform took the Propeller team less than two months to roll out to full production deployment. When they released the new feature, the team also retroactively tiled all previously uploaded IFC files, delivering immediate value to their users without requiring re-uploads or workflow changes:

"Integrating the Cesium Design Tiler into our platform has revolutionized our support for BIM for all our customers. Cesium's expertise in the 3D Tiles open standard has delivered us a solution with greatly improved performance, accuracy, and feature richness—we've delivered highly requested features and given our construction customers confidence in an easy-to-use pipeline, revolutionizing their workflows," Morris said.

Explore how you can use 3D Tiles to make your datasets more accessible with Cesium’s 3D tiling pipelines.  

Propeller Streaming Complex IFC Files for Construction with 3D Tiles 

Last year, Cesium released the first readily accessible, comprehensive 3D Tileset of the Moon. Today, we are excited to introduce Cesium Mars. Cesium Mars is a 3D Tileset to enable developers, researchers, and mission planners to create visualizations and simulations of the Red Planet. 

Cesium Mars comprises precise terrain captured by NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA), paired with colorized imagery. Cesium Mars is provided as 3D Tiles, the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) community standard created by Cesium. 

Enabling a digital ecosystem for planetary data 

A wealth of Mars data has already been captured by orbital and rover missions. The seven man-made satellites from five space agencies currently orbiting Mars and the two active rovers on Mars, NASA's Curiosity and Perseverance, send home more data every day through the Mars Relay Network. In addition, two space agencies are actively planning manned missions to Mars, and several additional agencies are planning for continued robotic exploration and orbital analysis. Cesium Mars lowers the barrier to entry for studying existing and new Mars data and for leveraging this ever-increasing data as part of the planning, execution, and analysis for Mars programs. A precise, easily accessed model of Mars supports the space community in its efforts toward an open, interoperable platform for a digital ecosystem supporting data captured beyond Earth.  

Mars viewed from space. Data for Cesium Mars from the Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter (MOLA) on the NASA Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) and the High-Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) on the ESA Mars Express. 

The Gale Crater, visualized with Cesium Mars.  

Cesium Mars draped with a Mars MOLA elevation map from NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio. 

The launch of Cesium Mars comes at the right time when there's a need for planetary-scale digital twins and simulation for the next leap in human and robotic spaceflight. Buendea intends to leverage Cesium Mars within NASA’s XR Operations Support System (XOSS) to expand our digital twin environments beyond the Moon and into Mars. By combining Cesium’s geospatial platform with our high-fidelity interactive environments in Unreal Engine, we are creating a foundation for next-generation mission planning, astronaut training, and real-time operations in support of these efforts.  

Cesium Moon in XOSS in VR mode. Courtesy Buendea and NASA’s Advanced Operations Concepts Lab.

Since Cesium Moon’s release, the dataset has become a foundation for digital twins for mission planning, for training simulators, and for games. We anticipate similar uses for Cesium Mars. 

Space architects designing for the Moon and Mars are already employing workflows like those used for infrastructure on Earth. Cesium Mars enables those processes to converge, as users leverage functionality available for our open source runtime engines. Use Cesium Mars as a base layer to place models of habitats, vehicles, or rovers on the Martian surface. If you have your own high-resolution terrain data, clip and inset it so your projects can live within a single continuous 3D surface rather than multiple separate project areas. Share realistic, interactive 3D design visualizations with large, dispersed teams to facilitate review, highlight design alternatives, and present designs as they change over time. 

NASA’s Perseverance rover on Mars, viewed with Cesium for Unreal in Unreal Engine.

Cesium Mars is provided as 3D Tiles using the IAU_2015:49901 CRS and is composed of the ⁠Mars Viking Colorized Global Mosaic 232m imagery and ⁠Mars MGS MOLA - MEX HRSC Blended DEM Global 200m for terrain, along with higher resolution data for the Jezero and Gale craters. Cesium’s visualization engines—CesiumJS, Cesium for Unreal, Cesium for Unity, and Cesium for Omniverse—are ready for you to start building with Cesium Mars using an accurate representation of the planetary ellipsoid for measurement and analysis. Cesium Mars is available via Cesium ion SaaS and Cesium ion Self-Hosted.

This CesiumJS Sandcastle provides an example of how to include Cesium Mars in a web app. A sample level in Cesium for Unreal provides an example for how to get started with development using Cesium Mars in Unreal Engine. 

As lunar and interplanetary missions proceed, the need for an open, interoperable, standards-based platform to support simulation, planning, and analysis has never been greater. Cesium Mars, along with Cesium Moon, is a step toward this vision, offering a precise and scalable foundation. 

To access Cesium Mars, sign up or sign in to Cesium ion, locate the asset in the Cesium ion Asset Depot, and add the tileset to your Asset Library. Then start building! Create Cesium Stories, incorporate the data into a CesiumJS web app, or build advanced visualizations with 3D creation engines such as Unreal Engine. 

In August, we attended SIGGRAPH, MODSIM World, TAK Offsite, and P3DL; celebrated YouthMappers’ grant-funded 3D course; and introduced iTwin Platform to Cesium developers.  

Follow the tutorials to kickstart your use of iTwin Platform with Cesium.

CesiumJS 1.133 is now available. Highlights of the release include:

Added Ellipsoid.MARS for use with Mars terrain and imagery. #12828 

Added spherical harmonics support for Gaussian splats, supported with the SPZ compression format. #12790 

Added support for the EXT_mesh_primitive_restart glTF extension. #12764 

Fixes issue where a Gaussian splat tileset would be rendered even if out of current camera view. #12840 

Removes the minimum tile threshold of four for WMTS. #4372 

Fixed a crash when loading PNTS (point cloud) data that contained a batch table without a binary part. #11166 

For more details, see the changelog. We also welcome your thoughts on the new version of Sandcastle.

The path of NASA's Mars Perseverance rover rendered in CesiumJS. Data courtesy NASA, European Space Agency, and the USGS Astrogeology Science Center.

Cesium for Unreal v2.19.1 is now available. Highlights of this release include:

Added assets for the IAU2015 Moon and Mars ellipsoids under Content. 

Added a missing CesiumRuntime.h include in CesiumPropertyAttribute.cpp that broke compilation in v2.18.0 on Windows. 

Fixed a bug in FCesiumVectorStyle that made polygons use the color mode from LineStyle instead of PolygonStyle. 

Fixed a bug that could cause a crash when undoing and redoing deletion of a CesiumRasterOverlay component. 

Fixed a crash in UCesiumLoadGeoJsonDocumentFromIonAsyncAction that occurred when a Cesium ion server was not specified. The action will now fall back to the default ion server, similar to ACesium3DTileset. 

Fixed a bug that could cause incorrect ellipsoid parameters to be used when loading a level. 

In addition to the above, this release updates cesium-native from v0.50.0 to v0.51.0. See the changelog for a complete list of changes in cesium-native. 

Cesium for Unity v1.18.0 is now available. Highlights of this release include:

Added option to ignore the KHR_material_unlit extension to force default lighting on tilesets. 

Fixed a bug where CesiumCreditSystem did not accurately track the loading progress of images, which could result in missing credits. 

Fixed a bug where CesiumPointCloudRenderer could dereference a null CesiumPointCloudShading on Cesium3DTileset. 

Coming soon: Cesium Mars. Stay tuned for the full announcement later this week. 

Fixed an issue with texture size estimation for tiles, which could negatively impact performance and cause tileset trees to be deeper than necessary. 

Fixed an issue that would cause some tile textures to have an invalid sampler index. 

NORAD Tracks Santa: A Cesium-Powered Christmas Tradition

Virtual City Systems Advocates Open Source for Urban Digital Twins

Cesium Releases in December 2025

Cesium Releases in November 2025

Terradepth Processes Seafloor Data at the Edge with Cesium ion Self-Hosted

Cesium Releases in October 2025

Propeller Streaming Complex IFC Files for Construction with 3D Tiles