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今回ご紹介するのは、大阪公立大学の金子健作博士による挑戦です。金子氏は建築物の耐震工学を専門とし、最近では、AIを活用した構造ヘルスモニタリング (SHM) を研究されています。SHMとは建物内に加速度センサを設置して、大きな地震の発生直後に建物の安全性を自動的に判定する技術です。このSHMの新たな展開に関して、金子博士はこのSHMシステムの普及を進めるために、3DのWeb GISで建物の安全性を可視化する新たなアプローチに挑戦しています。

構造ヘルスモニタリング（SHM）に利用される加速度センサは、地震時の建物の揺れを記録します。これらのセンサは建物内に設置され、クラウドサーバーにデータを自動的にアップロードする機能もあります。(画像提供：金子 健作 博士）

金子氏がCesiumJSに興味を持ったきっかけは、2021年に国土交通省のProject PLATEAUに関する記事を読んだことでした。Project PLATEAUは、日本全国の3D都市モデルを整備し、オープンデータとして公開する国家プロジェクトです。

「当時、私はGISを本格的に使ったことがありませんでした。しかし、PLATEAU ViewerでCesiumJSが使われていることを知り、試してみようと思いました。また、地球規模の数千kmから建物室内の数mまでスケール感を損なわずにシームレスに可視化できる点に強く惹かれました。」（金子博士）

最初は純粋な興味から始めましたが、CesiumJSの柔軟な3D可視化の可能性に魅了され、学びを深めていきました。2Dでは味わえない3Dならではのスケール感を実感し、オープンデータの活用とWebでの展開により、より多くの人々に役立つシステムを世に問うことが大きなモチベーションの一つとなりました。彼はCesiumJSで多数のエンティティを効率的にレンダリングし、地上構造物と地下構造物の両方を表示する方法を学ぶ中で、Cesium community forumなどのリソースを活用しました。

大阪市内で想定される津波浸水深と3D都市モデル、緊急避難場所の情報を重ね合わせてWeb上で表示した例。（画像提供：金子 健作 博士）

金子氏はAIによる都市スケールの広範囲な地震被害推定と構造ヘルスモニタリング（SHM） の統合を目指した先端的な研究に取り組んでおり、Cesiumはそれに役立てられています。将来的にSHMは、ドライブレコーダーのように多くの建物に導入されて一般市民に認知されことが期待されるなか、AIはSHMの普及を後押しすると金子氏は確信しています。研究過程で開発されたシステムは、「MeSM」と命名されています。MeSMという呼称は、Machine Learning-Enhanced Structural Health Monitoring（機械学習を活用した構造ヘルスモニタリング）プロジェクに由来しています。現在では、SHMの記録やAI機能を含む研究成果を省いた形で、市民が日常的に活用できるようにWebアプリケーションが一般公開され、防災講座や教育にも活用されています。

この研究プロジェクトは、三つのアプローチから構成されています。第一のアプローチは、日本の気象庁から得られる地震情報（震源位置、震源深さ、マグニチュードなど）を基に、3D都市モデルを活用して建物ごとの構造情報を考慮したうえで、事前学習したAIによって都市レベルでの地震被害を即時に推定するものです。この推定は、数十万棟規模あるいはそれ以上の面的な被害情報を含み、CesiumJSを用いて可視化されます。ただし、この手法には被害推定の不確かさが伴うという課題があります。第二のアプローチは、加速度センサを1台だけ設置した建物において、センサ情報と構造設計情報を組み合わせて被害推定を行うものです。この手法により、特定の建物に対しては高い確度での被害推定を可視化できます。現在は、集合住宅の設計・建設を主業務とする建設業者との共同研究を通じて、社会実装を展開している段階です。しかし、このアプローチは加速度センサ（SHMシステム）が導入されていない建物には適用できず、都市全体の面的な被害推定には利用できないという制約があります。第三のアプローチは、第一と第二のアプローチを統合したハイブリッド手法です。具体的には、SHMシステムが導入されている建物の情報を活用し、周辺の建物を含む面的に広がる建物群に対して、AIによる地震被害推定の信頼性を向上させるよう補正を行うものです。これは、カーナビゲーションシステムに例えると、GPSと車載センサを組み合わせて車の位置を推定する仕組みに類似しています。

第三のアプローチの実現には、SHMデータの共有（部分的なオープンデータ化）が不可欠ですが、その実現には制度的な課題や、利他的行為の必要性といった障壁などが多く存在します。そこで金子氏は、CesiumJSを用いた魅力的な可視化によって、この手法の必要性を段階的に社会へ示すことで、第三のアプローチの実現を目指しています。その取り組みの一環として、市民が日常的に活用できるWebアプリケーションが一般公開され、地震被害情報への理解や将来的な地震リスクへの関心を高めることが期待されています。

Cesiumを用いた最初の可視化実装には約2週間かかりましたが、その後はさらに湧き上がる興味が学習を後押ししました。Project PLATEAUの3D都市モデルのほかにも、気象庁や国土地理院、防災科学技術研究所、USGS（アメリカ地質調査所）などが公開する様々なオープンデータを活用して、CesiumJS上での3D可視化を実現しました。その後は少しずつ開発を進め、地震被害推定について開発したAIをOpen Neural Network Exchange(ONNX) ファイル形式でCesiumJSに統合するなど、数ヶ月程度で研究に活用できるレベルまで到達しました。

MeSM では、例えば2021年東北地方太平洋沖地震で観測された地表の加速度記録を3Dで対話的に閲覧することが可能です。（画像提供：金子 健作 博士）

さらに、MeSM では、人が体感できない小さな地震も含めて、震源の分布を3Dで表示し、回転アニメーションを通じて立体的に視覚化しています。（動画提供：金子 健作 博士）

さらに、MeSM では、人が体感できない小さな地震も含めて、震源の分布を3Dで表示し、回転アニメーションを通じて立体的に視覚化しています。(動画提供：金子 健作 博士）

MeSM visualizes earthquake epicenter distributions in 3D—even for small, imperceptible quakes—enhanced with rotating animations to provide a spatially intuitive experience. Courtesy Kensaku Kaneko.

MeSM by Kensaku Kaneko

3. Cesium Certifed Developerの取得と今後の研究の展望

金子氏がCesium Certifed Developer (CCD) の取得を考えたのは、Cesiumの知識修得の過程で恩恵を受けたオープンコミュニティーに恩返しをしたいという思いからでした。当初はJavaScriptもGISもまったくの初心者でしたが、1年でCCDを取得されるに至りました。

「Cesium Certified Developerには、地理空間情報やWebアプリケーション開発の専門家が応募するに値すると感じていました。最初は応募を躊躇しましたが、他分野からの積極的な参加がコミュニティーの発展に繋がると考えて、応募しました。」

金子氏は、継続的にCesiumJSを活用して研究を発展させるとともに、若い世代への教育や防災意識の向上にも貢献する考えです。彼が所属する大阪公立大学は、都市型の森之宮キャンパスを2025年に開設予定です。今後は、そのBIM（Building Information Modeling）などのデータをCesiumJSなどで活用し、都市から建物の室内までを結びつける新たな地震防災とSHMの挑戦に取り組んでいくようです。

2025年秋に開学する大阪公立大学の都市型森之宮キャンパスのCG（画像提供: 大阪公立大学）

金子氏は、これからの展望について次のように語ります。

「3D地理情報の可視化は単なる技術ではなく、社会に貢献する手段です。見慣れたデータであっても、3D表示やさまざまなデータとの重ね合わせによって、新たな発見が生まれることがあります。その発見はユーザーごとに異なり、他者と共有することで、より多様な視点が生まれることが期待されます。」


CesiumJSを使用して、2Dでは見えなかった地理空間のインサイトを容易かつ効果的に視覚化し、分析する方法を学びましょう。

The Journey of an Earthquake Engineering Researcher Utilizing CesiumJS—Structural Health Monitoring in the Digital Twin Era

This article highlights the challenge taken on by Dr. Kensaku Kaneko from Osaka Metropolitan University. Specializing in earthquake engineering of buildings, Dr. Kaneko has recently been engaged in research on structural health monitoring (SHM) using AI. SHM involves installing accelerometers in buildings to automatically assess their structural safety immediately after a major earthquake. To promote the adoption of this SHM system, Dr. Kaneko is pioneering a new approach—visualizing building safety through 3D Web GIS.

Accelerometers used in SHM record the building's response during an earthquake. These sensors can automatically upload data to cloud servers. Courtesy Kensaku Kaneko.

Dr. Kaneko’s interest in CesiumJS began in 2021 when he came across an article on Japan’s Project PLATEAU—a national initiative to develop and release 3D city models as open data.
 “At the time, I had no prior experience with GIS. However, I learned that the PLATEAU Viewer used CesiumJS and decided to try it myself. I was deeply drawn to the ability to seamlessly visualize scales ranging from thousands of kilometers down to just a few meters inside a building without losing a sense of scale,” recalls Dr. Kaneko.

What began as a simple curiosity turned into a deep interest, as he became captivated by CesiumJS’s flexibility for 3D visualization. Experiencing a sense of scale not achievable in 2D and realizing the potential to create open, web-based systems that could benefit society became a strong motivation. As he learned to efficiently render large numbers of entities and display both above-ground and underground structures in CesiumJS, Dr. Kaneko used resources like the Cesium community forum.

An example of a web-based visualization combining projected tsunami inundation depths in Osaka, 3D city models, and emergency evacuation sites. Courtesy Kensaku Kaneko.

2. Application to research and implementation

Dr. Kaneko is conducting advanced research that integrates AI-driven large-scale earthquake damage estimation with SHM. CesiumJS plays a vital role in this endeavor. He envisions SHM becoming as commonplace and familiar to the public as dashboard cameras in the future. AI, he believes, will play a key role in accelerating SHM’s widespread adoption.

Through this research, Dr. Kaneko developed MeSM, short for Machine Learning-Enhanced Structural Health Monitoring. A simplified version of the system—excluding the SHM logs and AI functionality—is publicly available. This web app is already being used in disaster preparedness courses and educational programs.

The research project is built on three core approaches:

Using earthquake data (e.g., epicenter location, depth, magnitude) from the Japan Meteorological Agency and integrating pre-trained AI models with 3D city models to estimate urban-scale earthquake damage in real time. This allows visualization of damage across hundreds of thousands of buildings using CesiumJS. This method involves a degree of uncertainty in its predictions.

By installing a single accelerometer in a building and combining its data with structural design information, it enables more accurate damage estimation for individual buildings. This approach is currently being applied through joint research with a construction firm specializing in residential buildings. This is not suitable for buildings without SHM sensors and thus does not support area-wide damage assessments.

A hybrid method combines the above two approaches. Information from SHM-equipped buildings is used to correct and enhance the AI-driven estimates for surrounding buildings. This is similar to how GPS and vehicle sensors are used together to improve location accuracy in car navigation systems.

To implement this third approach, sharing SHM data (even partially as open data) is essential. However, institutional barriers and the need for altruistic participation pose challenges. Dr. Kaneko aims to overcome these through compelling visualizations using CesiumJS, raising awareness of the method’s societal value via the existing public version of MeSM, encouraging public engagement with earthquake risk.

The initial Cesium visualization took about two weeks to build, but Dr. Kaneko’s curiosity drove him to further deepen his skills. In addition to Project PLATEAU’s 3D city models, he leveraged open data from the Japan Meteorological Agency, Geospatial Information Authority of Japan (GSI), National Research Institute for Earth Science and Disaster Resilience (NIED), and the US Geological Survey (USGS).

Within a few months, he advanced the system to a research-ready level, even integrating his AI model into CesiumJS using the Open Neural Network Exchange (ONNX) format.

In MeSM, users can interactively explore surface acceleration data recorded during the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake in 3D. Courtesy Kensaku Kaneko.

MeSM visualizes earthquake epicenter distributions in 3D—even for small, imperceptible quakes—enhanced with rotating animations to provide a spatially intuitive experience. Courtesy Kensaku Kaneko.

3. Becoming a Cesium Certified Developer and future prospects

Dr. Kaneko pursued the Cesium Certified Developer (CCD) certification with a desire to give back to the open community that had supported his learning journey. Despite having no prior experience with JavaScript or GIS, he became a CCD within a year.

“I felt the CCD program was something best suited for experts in geospatial and web application development. I was hesitant at first, but I came to believe that active participation from those in other fields would benefit the community,” he says.

The university he belongs to, Osaka Metropolitan University, is scheduled to open its urban Morinomiya Campus in 2025. Looking ahead, Dr. Kaneko aims to continue using CesiumJS in his research while also contributing to public disaster awareness and education for younger generations.

A CG rendering of the urban Morinomiya campus of Osaka Metropolitan University, scheduled to open in fall 2025. Courtesy of Osaka Metropolitan University.

He is now exploring the use of BIM (Building Information Modeling) to build an integrated disaster response and SHM platform that connects entire cities to the interiors of individual buildings.

“3D geospatial visualization is more than just a technical capability—it’s a tool for social contribution. Even familiar data can lead to new discoveries when visualized in 3D or combined with other datasets. These insights vary by user and can multiply through sharing and collaboration,” he notes.

Learn how to visualize and analyze geospatial insights—beyond what’s possible in 2D—effectively using CesiumJS.

耐震工学の研究者が歩むCesiumJS活用の軌跡　-　デジタルツイン時代の構造ヘルスモニタリング

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.

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 1.130 is now available. Highlights of the release include:

Added basic support for draping imagery on 3D Tiles. #12567 

Added support for 3D Textures, with a Volume Cloud sandcastle example. #12661. Many thanks to community contributor Hiwen for significant work on 3D Textures. 

Updated the FragmentInput struct for voxel shaders to be more consistent with other CustomShaders. #12636 

Fixed voxel rendering with orthographic cameras. #12629 

An example of draping imagery on 3D Tiles: Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles with Google Roadmap tiles overlay. 

Cesium for Unreal v2.16.1 is now available. Highlights of this release include:

Added support for TRIANGLE_FAN primitives in tile meshes. 

Worked around an Unreal Engine limitation that prevented collisions and line traces from working correctly for tilesets with a very small scale factor. 

Add a missing include for GEngine when packaging from source, introduced in v2.16.0. 

Fixed a regression from v2.16.0 that prevented the water mask from showing at closer distances. 

Fixed a bug in UCesiumFeaturesMetadataComponent where multiple references to same feature ID set would cause improper encoding of its feature IDs. 

Fixed a crash that would occur when duplicating an ACesiumGeoreference. 

Fixed a bug that caused tilesets to render incorrectly when Dynamic Material Instances were used for their material settings. 

Removed an unnecessary copy operation that happened while constructing tile meshes. 

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 v1.16.1 is now available. This release incorporates Cesium Native v0.48.0, providing fixes such as: 

Fixed a bug that prevented the Cesium ion troubleshooting window from appearing when tilesets were loaded with invalid tokens. 

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

Added support for mipmap generation, which is on by default. 

Improved texture quality for thin, double-sided geometry. 

Fixed an issue where some tiles could have duplicate triangles. 

Fixed an issue where geometric compression would not be applied to tilesets with a single tile. 

Reduced border erosion due to simplification. 

Fixed an issue where simplification would incorrectly handle borders.

- There are several breaking changes for configuration files:  
   - `gltf` and `tileset` options are now under `output` 
    - `csv` options are now under `input` 
    - `obj` options have been removed 

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

Ansys Geospatial Data Cloud integrates Cesium ion Self-Hosted and global 3D content to provide STK with out-of-the-box access to accurate geospatial context within its time-dynamic simulations. 

Boost Graphics uses Cesium for Unreal and Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles to create dynamic locators of the Premier League's stadiums across the United Kingdom for a global TV audience. 

In April, we attended the 40th Space Symposium, hosted the Philly Postgres meetup and PhillyCHI UX panel, and released the full agenda for the Cesium Developer Conference. (Will we see you there?) Today we announced 3D Tiles for Godot, an open source plugin for Godot Engine built by Battle Road through the support of a Cesium Ecosystem Grant.

New York City, New York, USA, visualized with Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles via 3D Tiles for Godot. Courtesy Battle Road.

CesiumJS 1.129 is now available. Highlights of the release include:

VoxelProvider.minimumBounds and .maximumBounds are now specified as physical values, rather than shape space values. #12592 

Added Material with Custom GLSL Sandbox Demo. #12549 

QuadtreePrimitive.updateHeights now converts position to Cartographic before invoking the callback, ensuring compatibility with change introduced by commit 53889cb and preventing unnecessary computation. #12555 

Fixed Polyline*MaterialProperty width artifacts (reverted #12434). #12506 

New Sandcastle showing off a Material with custom GLSL shaders by user Hiwen. 

Cesium for Unreal v2.16.0 is now available. Highlights of this release include:

Added the ability to query the Cesium ion geocoder from Blueprints to resolve place names and addresses to longitude and latitude. 

Added UCesiumMetadataPickingBlueprintLibrary::FindPropertyTableProperty to search for a FCesiumPropertyTableProperty by name on a given UPrimitiveComponent. 

The request cache will now use FPaths::ProjectUserDir instead of FPaths::EngineUserDir on non-Android and non-iOS platforms, fixing a permissions issue in Development builds. 

Fixed a linking issue introduced in v2.15.0 in GoogleTilesTestSetup. 

Point cloud tiles will now be upsampled for raster overlays, fixing an issue where applying a raster overlay to a point cloud tileset would cause holes to appear. 

Fixed a crash caused by invalid I3dm headers. 

Bing Maps Aerial imagery draped on an attenuated point cloud of Mount St. Helens in Cesium for Unreal. Point cloud generated from LAS data provided by https://liblas.org.

Cesium for Unity v1.16.0 is now available. Highlights of this release include:

Added CesiumUrlTemplateRasterOverlay component, allowing a raster overlay to be added using tiles requested based on a specified URL template. 

Fixed a bug where credits would not display in the Game tab after entering Play Mode. 

Improved stability during AppDomain reloads by catching exceptions thrown while freeing tiles. 

Cesium for Omniverse v0.25.0 is now available. Highlights of this release include:

Cesium for Omniverse now targets Kit 106.5. 

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

Download the Cesium for Omniverse extension

Download the Cesium for Omniverse samples

Improved tileset load times by 50% and rendering performance by 15% by reducing the number of draw calls and decreasing the amount of geometry rendered for any given view. 

Improved support for parsing sidecar files with CRS data. 

Cesium ion for Autodesk Revit Add-In 1.2.0

Added support for an elements unique ID, level, and room metadata. 

Removed unused root node project level metadata. 

Fixed crash when exporting with textures enabled and metadata disabled. 

Buendea uses Cesium Moon Terrain to support NASA’s Advanced Operations Concepts Lab (NAOCL), ensuring astronauts’ virtual training accurately reflects the lunar environments they’ll encounter when they leave home. XR Operations Support System (XOSS) is a collaboration between Buendea and NAOCL, based out of Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston, Texas, USA. XOSS users have the entire Moon in their simulation and can further immerse themselves in nine potential landing and habitation sites near the lunar South Pole, where Cesium Moon Terrain has its highest resolution data and Buendea has added additional high-res surface data. 

XOSS in VR mode. Courtesy Buendea and NAOCL.

This summer’s inaugural Cesium Developer Conference, June 23-25 in Philadelphia, is an opportunity for developers to network and learn about the latest and greatest open geospatial tools, standards, and data. For attendees looking for a hands-on experience to learn Cesium, we are excited to offer the "Cesium Deep Dive," a pre-conference training full-day workshop on Monday, June 23.

Register and select the Cesium Deep Dive training

Northern California, USA, using Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles in CesiumJS.

If you are a burgeoning geospatial developer, this workshop is for you.

Bring your own laptop so you’re prepared to build, ask questions, and learn new skills to take your 3D geospatial projects to the next level.

Training includes intros to CesiumJS and Cesium ion, then explores deeper discussions on deploying Cesium Native and using 3D creation engine plugins. 

Engineers will present ready-to-try exercises and will be present to help you explore features of Cesium and 3D Tiles. There will also be opportunities for you to meet 1:1 with engineers if you need help with a specific question.

We’re excited to have two special guests presenting and mentoring attendees throughout the day:

Tim Woodard, Principal Solutions Architect at NVIDIA, will present an update on NVIDIA Omniverse and how using it can benefit open geospatial developers.

Stephen Phillips, Solution Architect at Epic Games, will give an overview of how Unreal Engine can be used in AEC and geospatial applications.

Using Cesium runtime plugins for geospatial context

Unreal Engine for geospatial and AEC applications

NVIDIA Omniverse architecture and applications

Prior to the workshop, the Cesium team will send out information to registered training attendees with instructions for downloads and device configuration so that you are ready when you arrive.

The Grand Canyon, USA, visualized with Cesium for Omniverse.

Will I become a Cesium Certified Developer?

We’ve been getting this question a lot: Will a workshop attendee automatically become a Cesium Certified Developer?

No. Certification is based on one's ability to deploy the skills covered throughout this workshop in their own work. You will learn many of the skills needed for certification over the course of the day, and then it will be up to you to put these skills into practice and submit your project. Our Certification team will be on site throughout the full conference to discuss certification. 

Learn more about becoming a Cesium Certified Developer here.

Sign up for the training through the regular conference registration process. There is an additional fee ($100) to attend the workshop because space is limited. Lunch and refreshments are provided.

Slots are filling up. We look forward to learning with you.

Register for the conference and add the workshop

Deep Dive Workshop at the Cesium Developer Conference

In March, we attended NVIDIA GTC 2025, presented at The Khronos Group’s “3D on the Web” during GDC 2025, and shared that the Cesium Design Tiler now preserves metadata from Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) when tiling into 3D Tiles. 

We’re also hard at work on finalizing the agenda for the 2025 Cesium Developer Conference. Register to join us in Philadelphia in June.  

Color ramp shading based on an IFC length property in Cesium for Unreal. Data source: BSI (2020) "Medical-Dental Test Files," buildingSMART International—accessible via GitHub.

CesiumJS 1.128 is now available. Highlights of the release include:

Added support for loading iTwin data using share keys as an alternative to user-based OAuth. When using a share key, set ITwinPlatform.defaultShareKey. #12530 

Added Frozen.EMPTY_OBJECT and Frozen.EMPTY_ARRAY for use as default parameter values that avoid unnecessary memory allocations. #12507 

Fixed entity tracking for delayed datasource bounding spheres. #12465 

Camera.getPickRay now correctly returns a ray with origin in world coordinates in orthographic mode. #12500 

Fixed camera zooming in 3D orthographic mode when pixelRatio is not 1. #12487 

Fixed shape bounds and transforms for cylinder-shaped voxels. #12522 

Fixed an issue where clamped entities' height updates could stall when using high-resolution terrain due to a growing queue of tiles in updateHeights in QuadtreePrimitive. #12476 

Cesium for Unreal v2.15.0 is now available. Highlights of this release include:

Actors spawned through the Cesium editor panel, such as tilesets and cartographic polygons, will now be parented to the first selected georeference—if any—instead of always being parented to the first georeference in the scene. 

WorldHeight Runtime Virtual Texture output is now set to the Z component of the world position. 

Fixed a bug where a glTF material with alphaMode=BLEND would be rendered as opaque if its baseColorFactor was not set. 

Fixed a crash that could occur when rapidly refreshing a tileset. 

Fixed a crash when tilesets with point clouds were used in combination with Hardware Ray Tracing. 

Worked around an apparent Metal problem that prevented polygon clipping from working correctly on macOS. 

Fixed normals being incorrectly written to Runtime Virtual Texture output in tangent space instead of in world space. 

When a glTF contains external resources like textures and buffers, requests for these external resources now include query parameters that were used to request the original glTF. This is important when using access tokens and similar. 

Fixed bugs that could prevent valid metadata in Instanced 3D Model (i3dm) files from being parsed correctly. 

Fixed a small memory leak while reading glTF files. 

Cesium for Unity v1.15.5 is now available. Highlights of this release include:

Fixed a bug that could cause a crash when reloading a scene or tileset repeatedly. 

The Cesium Design Tiler now preserves metadata from Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) when tiling into 3D Tiles. Metadata support includes IFC attributes, property sets, and properties. Read more. 

As part of our ongoing effort to improve performance, we are adding a "Region" field to Cesium ion. New users will be asked to set their region when setting up their account. For existing accounts, we will automatically set the region based on the locations from which data requests have been made in the past year. 

glTF node names are now preserved as metadata. 

IFC metadata attributes type detection added, no longer limited to just strings. 

fix for a regression with terrain water masks 

Blyncsy uses CesiumJS to show potential users how the company’s roadway data can be used in a visualization engine. 

The Weather Company improves military training and planning by pairing its detailed weather data with geospatial context in apps using Cesium for Unreal and CesiumJS.   

Defense and other government agencies rely on current weather information, forecasts, and historical data for situational awareness and effective decision-making. The Weather Company (TWC) improves military training and planning by pairing its detailed weather data with geospatial context in apps using Cesium for Unreal and CesiumJS.  

WeatherverseTM provides accessible, accurate, and actionable government weather forecast data and visualizations to improve outcomes, reduce costs, and help protect lives. Courtesy The Weather Company.

The Weather Company: Weatherverse

TWC was founded in the 1980s, addressing needs across various industries, and began serving government agencies in 2022. Sudden changes in weather conditions affect personnel and equipment, even with otherwise meticulous planning.  

Weatherverse Sim prepares warfighters with accurate 3D visualizations of environments and conditions—such as strong wind, more rain, or less cloud coverage—simulating weather they might face in the field. With recording and playback, trainees can experience and memorize scenarios for anywhere in the world, and trainers can adjust future sessions. Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles are streamed with data from TWC’s SUN Spatial Data Services and other sources for a comprehensive picture. Weatherverse Sim has used Cesium for Unreal since 2023 to bring realistic weather elements and geospecific terrain to these simulations, increasing operational effectiveness. 

Weatherverse Sim uses Cesium for Unreal to combine weather elements and terrain. Courtesy The Weather Company.

Weatherverse Planner monitors the forecast for locations important to planning teams and their missions, so they know what impacts weather will have on aviation, communications, infantry, and more. Users set thresholds and alerts for conditions like lightning, wind, or precipitation, for example, to make better informed decisions. Weatherverse Planner can be used as a stand-alone solution or integrated as a widget within any CesiumJS-based app for reliable performance on the web, streaming Bing Maps Aerial imagery for the view from space. Fusing weather data and geospatial context instead of managing multiple separate systems concurrently saves time and lives. Weatherverse Planner has used CesiumJS since 2024. 

Weather risk, based on user-defined parameters, in Weatherverse Planner. Courtesy The Weather Company.

Precipitation in Weatherverse Planner. Courtesy The Weather Company.

Weather conditions in Singleton, Australia, in Weatherverse Planner. Courtesy The Weather Company.

SimCentric’s CesiumJS-based SAF-Foresight app for planning and safety for live fire exercises will deploy Weatherverse Planner as a plugin for Exercise Talisman Sabre 2025. Exercise Talisman Sabre is the largest combined military training activity between Australia and the United States, with other partner nations joining, and this year it will incorporate real-time weather information to improve readiness. 

The Weather Company has built on top of CesiumJS as a plugin to further support and integrate Weatherverse Planner. The TWC-Cesium Plugin includes the protocols for acquiring, storing, querying, and filtering weather data from its SUN weather and spatial data services and integrates with existing Cesium-based apps. It is in an experimental phase. 

“Cesium provides a deep and rich set of capabilities, especially with regards to 3D orientation and geospatial data visualization. The framework is also well documented, approachable, and performant,” said J.R. Cottingham, senior director for The Weather Company’s Weatherverse. 

Weatherverse Planner deployed as a widget in CesiumJS-powered SAF-Foresight. Courtesy The Weather Company and SimCentric.

TWC is working to improve Weatherverse Planner with additional weather visualizations, such as wind streams. 

Built on open standards to support interoperability and with commitment to rapid innovation, Cesium powers mission-critical applications to better understand the operational environment. Read more federal and defense-related stories. 

The Weather Company Brings Forecasts to Military Planning with Cesium 

Keeping roads well maintained and safe for travel requires up-to-date information about roadway conditions, including potholes, missing signage, guardrail damage, and other potential safety hazards.  

Blyncsy, founded in 2014 and acquired by Bentley in 2023, uses AI, machine vision, and cloud computing to help US state and local transportation agencies spot issues more efficiently than with resource-heavy manual methods. CesiumJS plays a critical role in helping Blyncsy show potential users how the company’s data can be used in a visualization engine. 

Striping retroreflectivity across the US. Courtesy Blyncsy. 

Blyncsy gets road pictures by crowdsourcing images from over 1,200,000 vehicles, including privately owned commercial and fleet vehicles and delivery trucks. The company anonymizes the data and securely stores it in the cloud, where it can be studied and analyzed by machine learning systems, machine vision, and AI. The analyzed data is then delivered to users through Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) APIs, ensuring seamless integration with a variety of platforms, including Cesium and other transportation management systems, for georeferencing, visualization, and analysis.  

“Selling data is abstract. Since the beginning, long before we were acquired, CesiumJS has provided a flexible, easy to use, and high-performing way to show the value of our solution to potential customers,” Pat Brown, principal software engineer at Blyncsy, explained. “Cesium’s open-source approach was also a big draw for us—it gave us the freedom to innovate without being constrained by licensing fees or proprietary limitations.” 

Brown and his colleagues use CesiumJS not only to attract new business but also to save valuable engineering resources: “With CesiumJS we can focus our team’s time on building our platform instead of the front-end engineering that would be needed to eloquently visualize the data.” 

US interstate highway system roadway safety and maintenance conditions. Courtesy Blyncsy.

In 2023, Blyncsy began publishing a series of their AI-powered detection maps to provide state and local agencies with free access to select datasets. Built on CesiumJS with TerriaMap, that series includes a comprehensive public map of all interstate highways in the continental US, showing key roadway assets such as guardrails, speed limit signs, and work zones to support roadway safety and maintenance conditions.  

Laura Chace, president and CEO of Intelligent Transportation Society of America (ITS America), lauded the release of Blyncsy’s publicly available maps. ITS America was established by Congress in 1991 to serve as an advisor to the US Department of Transportation and advocates for a smarter, greener future transformed by transportation technology and innovation. 

“The application of advanced technologies like AI, combined with new sources of data, are transforming the transportation sector, giving us better information as we make investments in safety and mobility,” Chace said in a Bentley blog. “We applaud companies like Blyncsy for deploying these forward-thinking technologies and making this digital infrastructure data available to the public in an accessible format.”  

耐震工学の研究者が歩むCesiumJS活用の軌跡　-　デジタルツイン時代の構造ヘルスモニタリング

Cesium Releases in June 2025

Cesium Releases in May 2025

Deep Dive Workshop at the Cesium Developer Conference

Cesium Releases in April 2025

The Weather Company Brings Forecasts to Military Planning with Cesium

Blyncsy Shows Transportation Agencies the Future of Roadway Maintenance with CesiumJS

耐震工学の研究者が歩むCesiumJS活用の軌跡 - デジタルツイン時代の構造ヘルスモニタリング

Cesium Releases in June 2025

Cesium Releases in May 2025

Deep Dive Workshop at the Cesium Developer Conference

Cesium Releases in April 2025

The Weather Company Brings Forecasts to Military Planning with Cesium

Blyncsy Shows Transportation Agencies the Future of Roadway Maintenance with CesiumJS

耐震工学の研究者が歩むCesiumJS活用の軌跡　-　デジタルツイン時代の構造ヘルスモニタリング