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Drones

Siloed approaches to architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) can lead to poor communication and collaboration across all phases of projects, resulting in delays and increased costs. DroneDeploy enables stakeholders to examine the entire life cycle of a project with its drone software and viewer, which use 3D Tiles and Cesium ion Self-Hosted to make massive photogrammetry datasets manageable and accessible.

Capture high-resolution aerial data to align teams and keep AEC projects on track. Courtesy DroneDeploy.

DroneDeploy Map Engine

Founded in 2013, DroneDeploy has been using Cesium since 2018. With solutions for construction, agriculture, and insurance, DroneDeploy has built a platform for drone operators to host, visualize, and analyze their aerial imagery and photogrammetry, often on mobile devices. 3D comes into play for these users with accurate models and measurements of new schools or surveys for homeowners who are considering solar panels, for example. Teams can regularly refer to and update the models, examining change over time, making informed decisions, and staying on schedule.

The company has users in 180 countries, who have scanned 1.7 million jobsites, including 2D imagery and 3D models. It has the world’s largest drone data repository.

Photogrammetry of a new high school tiled as 3D Tiles and streamed to DroneDeploy’s custom viewer. Courtesy DroneDeploy.

Operators run DroneDeploy’s software on their drones, capturing buildings and surroundings exactly as they are in the real world. This data is uploaded as aerial imagery or photogrammetry to DroneDeploy’s processing pipeline, which relies on Cesium’s 3D models tiler and point cloud tiler via Cesium ion Self-Hosted in their own environment, and is then available in DroneDeploy’s viewer for analysis and sharing.

Because users’ untiled models are multiple gigabytes, computers and networks might struggle with these massive datasets, especially phones or tablets. Using 3D Tiles means this data is optimized for streaming and designed for precision. 

“Customer datasets vary in size. For bigger datasets—like an entire construction site, multiple square kilometers—getting detail in an untiled model is nearly impossible. Tiling with Cesium allows us to get it in quickly and then refine while maintaining high quality and a high level of performance,” said Joseph Sullivan, DroneDeploy’s 3D engineering lead.

DroneDeploy unifies all its customers’ reality capture data—from drones, robots, 360 cameras, or smartphones—in one platform. Courtesy DroneDeploy.

DroneDeploy: Unified Reality Capture Data

With Cesium’s 3D Tiling Pipeline, DroneDeploy puts its engineering resources into its custom viewer rather than model processing, and users get photorealistic 3D models for decisions based on reality.

To easily bring massive datasets to AEC stakeholders, sign up for a free Cesium ion account.

DroneDeploy Visualizes Construction Sites with Cesium

In April 2024, AERO AI, a Cesium Certified Developer, was awarded a Cesium Ecosystem Grant to reintegrate Cesium ion and WebODM, a free and open source drone imagery processing platform from OpenDroneMap.

The OpenDroneMap community can now tile aerial data as 3D Tiles directly from the WebODM dashboard.

AERO AI’s Cesium Ecosystem Grant supports the WebODM Reintegration Project, focusing on the WebODM Cesium plugin. The plugin enables users from AEC, environmental conservation, geospatial analysis, and beyond to benefit from the ability to integrate, process, analyze, and visualize aerial data and 3D geospatial information.

Workflow for a user to process drone imagery in OpenDroneMap’s WebODM and upload to Cesium ion. Courtesy AERO AI.

Developed by OpenDroneMap, WebODM is open source software for drone image processing that is widely used by drone pilots, organizations, and academic institutions. It allows users to generate maps, point clouds, DEMs, and 3D models from aerial imagery. With the Cesium ion plugin, users can effortlessly upload this data to Cesium ion, where it is transformed into 3D Tiles for diverse applications. These include creating scalable, high-resolution immersive experiences and digital twins of buildings and urban environments. Users can also produce maps for disaster recovery, urban planning, wildlife management, and environmental monitoring, providing critical insights into terrain changes over time and improving decision-making for projects that require precise spatial analysis.

With the Cesium ion plugin, WebODM users can effortlessly upload their data to Cesium ion, where it is transformed into 3D Tiles for diverse applications. Courtesy AERO AI.

Cesium ion-WebODM Plugin

AERO AI rebuilt the Cesium plugin from the ground up, enabling the seamless integration of georeferenced ortho maps, point clouds, and 3D models generated in WebODM with Cesium ion. We removed the deprecated react-bootstrap dependency and implemented several API updates to improve overall functionality. We also resolved issues with dropdown buttons, refined styling with a cursor change, and refactored the modal usage. Our team fixed the file upload functionality in the UploadDialog and addressed text input issues. Plus we made adjustments to the task dialog, added logic to generate zip files for textured models, and updated the manifest plugin version while removing outdated dependencies. The full list of updates is here. Reach out to AERO AI with questions.

Options to upload and tile orthophotos, point clouds, surface models, and terrain models generated in WebODM to Cesium ion using the Cesium ion plugin for WebODM.

AERO AI developed the Simulated Environment for Geospatial Assets (SiEGA) platform, which integrates a variety of 3D technologies within an advanced physics engine. SiEGA supports streaming 3D Tiles and allows for the seamless import of WebODM assets, tiled through Cesium ion for high-resolution geospatial visualization. It is among the 3D creation engines that support streaming 3D Tiles.

WebODM-generated 3D model tiled as 3D Tiles by Cesium ion and streamed to AERO AI’s platform, SiEGA. Courtesy AERO AI.

The WebODM-Cesium ion integration is straightforward. Follow the new tutorial to try it out.

Create 3D Tiles from OpenDroneMap in WebODM

Last year, we told you about how modeling and simulation company MathWorks uses CesiumJS to visualize aerospace simulations. Now, MathWorks users can visualize aerospace vehicle dynamics and location using Cesium for Unreal. In its spring release, MathWorks included major updates to its Aerospace Blockset and UAV Toolbox with Cesium for Unreal integration.

Users visualize aerospace vehicle dynamics and location using Aerospace Blockset and Cesium for Unreal. Courtesy MathWorks.

MathWorks users can visualize aerospace vehicle dynamics and location using Cesium for Unreal.

MathWorks/Cesium for Unreal

MathWorks, known for technical computing with MATLAB and model-based designs with Simulink, has provided basic airport scenes and permitted creation of a custom scene in previous integrations with Unreal Engine. Its R2023a release in March enables users to simulate flights in other portions of Earth and match the real-world location with Cesium for Unreal.

With Simulink, engineers access customizable models of aircraft or automobiles in Blocksets to see how various systems interact instead of hand-coding every aspect of the models and environments. Toolboxes build onto MATLAB to analyze data. The Aerospace Blockset provides Simulink reference examples and blocks to model aircraft and spacecraft. With UAV Toolbox, users can design, simulate, test, and deploy controls and autonomy algorithms for UAV applications. As of March, both of those offerings included integration with Cesium for Unreal to bring 3D geospatial data to their models and simulations.

Users plan and analyze UAV flight paths with UAV Toolbox and Cesium for Unreal. Courtesy MathWorks.

MathWorks/Cesium for Unreal: UAV Toolbox

Just as an accurate model of an aircraft is vital to training and simulation, so is accurate 3D geospatial context: flying (and landing!) in Boston is different from Kathmandu. MathWorks’ integration with Cesium for Unreal brings together high-quality models, high-fidelity graphics rendering, and geospecific representations of Earth. Cesium ion subscribers access curated 3D content and can host and tile their own massive datasets as 3D Tiles for streaming to Unreal Engine.

Among MathWorks’ many resources are tutorials for visualizing in Cesium and for flying the De Havilland Beaver, which includes modeling the bush plane and flying it through user-selected locations in Cesium for Unreal.

Follow MathWorks’ tutorial for modeling and flying the De Havilland Beaver using Cesium for Unreal. Courtesy MathWorks.

Real-world data enables MathWorks users to more accurately represent and explore vehicle dynamics and plan flight paths. To get started with bringing 3D geospatial data to your aerospace and UAV simulations, follow the Cesium for Unreal tutorials.

MathWorks Uses Cesium for Unreal to Enhance Aerospace Vehicle Simulations

Skydio, the unicorn startup building autonomous drones, has just released their newest product, Skydio 3D ScanTM, which brings greater autonomy to the drone market. 3D Scan simplifies drone operation, promising AI-powered flight planning that automatically creates an optimized path for data capture, as well as on-board computer vision so the drone can avoid obstacles and pick up where it left off after battery changes. 

A key piece of 3D Scan is the Edge Model Viewer, a feature built on Cesium that provides an instant view of the datasets produced by 3D Scan, allowing rapid field assessments. Whereas currently drone operators have to wait until they’re back in the office to review what they captured in flight, with the Edge Model Viewer, operators can check a low-polygon 3D model on a mobile device as soon as they land the drone. 

Skydio’s Edge Model Viewer allows users to see a low-polygon 3D model and their photos, all spatially indexed, as soon as they land the drone.

The Edge Model Viewer, a feature built on Cesium that provides an instant view of the datasets produced by 3D Scan, allows rapid field assessments. The Edge Model Viewer is a key piece of Skydio 3D Scan.

Skydio Edge Model Viewer - Powered by Cesium

Quick review of a data capture drastically simplifies the workflow. That’s more nimbleness, fewer iterations, and improved captures. 

Law enforcement has only one chance to record an accident scene before cleanup begins, so seeing the data at the time of capture ensures nothing is missed. 

We learned more about the Edge Model Viewer from Skydio's lead engineer for the project, Rachel Basse:

"Working with Cesium has helped us turn 3D Scan's Edge Model Viewer feature into a game-changing customer experience. Being able to view 3D models in the field, even on a mobile device, is going to make a serious difference for our customers. We look forward to changing the game for drone inspection and mapping together!" 

Once satisfied with the data capture, the operator heads back to the office to download all the data from the flight, and export the photos to any photogrammetry tool. Many of those tools, including RealityCapture and ContextCapture, have integrations to Cesium ion, making it possible to view the photogrammetry data capture in 3D, together with geospatial context. 

Skydio 3D Scan makes it safer and easier to fly in tight spaces like this helicopter crash site.

Making drones simpler to fly means more people will be able to successfully use them. We’re proud to be part of that success as the drone data capture visualization platform of choice. To share your own drone data online, sign up for a free Cesium ion community account. 

Skydio’s Newest Autonomous Drone Software Brings Cesium to the Field

With high precision 3D visualization and measurement tools, global 3D terrain, and 3D Tiling that makes it possible to share even the largest 3D models, the Cesium platform supports unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) projects from flight planning to real-time mission tracking to visualizing UAV-captured data.

Sky-Drones, an enterprise drone hardware and software company, is the latest UAV company to use Cesium in their real-time control and unmanned traffic management offerings.

Flight plan together with real-time video in Sky-Drones Cloud showing the progress of a drone mission.

Sky-Drones reduces the complexity for end users with full stack UAV avionic solutions, including both hardware and software. They specialize in the whole ecosystem of enhanced flight and ground control, encrypted communication systems, and cloud-based management for an organization’s entire fleet of UAVs.

Sky-Drones Cloud - Mission Planning in 3D

Cesium is an essential component of the Sky-Drones Cloud flight planning services. Instead of relying on elevation profiles to plan missions, pilots get an intuitive 3D view that allows them to visually create flight paths with interactive waypoints, all in the context of high resolution Cesium World Terrain. Terrain data is integrated with weather information and airspace data from Altitude Angel, helping pilots avoid ground hazards, manned flights, and other airspace restrictions.

Sky-Drones displays ground hazards, such as these power lines, to guide pilots in creating a safe flight path. Pilots can view the flight plan from any perspective: rotate, change view angle, tilt, view from surface and get back to orthogonal view.

Sky-Drones Cloud provides entire-fleet readings and status updates on one screen, with clear visuals as to where each drone has been, where its next mission is, and the type of terrain that will be encountered. Meanwhile, located in the same hub of information, flight hours, battery life, and real-time flights and flight logs provide the necessary information to maintain and service a vast fleet of drones.

Airspace data in the Cesium-based viewer provides a detailed picture of potential restrictions, such as airports.

Sky-Drones clients inspect industrial sites remotely, fertilize crops with precision, and make medical deliveries to hospitals fighting COVID-19. Police departments in the UK use UAVs, datalinks, and cloud services provided by Sky-Drones to quickly assess situations before sending in a secondary team. With better clarity in crowded environments, challenging terrain, and expansive rural areas, they’re better able to deliver an appropriate response.

Sky-Drones clients perform remote inspections, such as this cell tower inspection, which includes a stream of the drone’s video view in real time.

For more information about Sky-Drones Cloud visit their website and sign up.

To try visualizing flight data yourself, follow our tutorial to build a flight tracker.

Cesium Supporting Remote Drone Operations and Unmanned Traffic Management with Sky-Drones

Every day, more than 100,000 commercial flights carry passengers around the world. At any given moment, you can see the real-time location of virtually all of those flights, not to mention a large portion of cargo and private flights, with Flightradar24, the premier flight tracking service.

Flightradar24 offers a wealth of data for plane enthusiasts watching the skies above them, for news outlets tracking air traffic incidents, and for ordinary people following the flights of friends and family.

Flightradar24’s 3D view, available in both the browser and mobile apps, is built with CesiumJS. The app shows the real-time location of flights, collected from terrestrial and satellite-based ADS-B transponders, radar, and more.

Planes are represented by a 3D model, which viewers can explore with a cockpit view, or from outside the plane, where they can pan and zoom to see the flight from any angle. When an aircraft is below 500 m, it also casts a shadow on the terrain below, calculated by the actual position of the sun at the time.

An aircraft in the 3D view cast shadows as they descend toward the airport.

Users can click on a flight to view details, such as flight number, speed, destination, altitude, and arrival time, as well as the data source. Viewers can see airports and other traffic, and can even switch flight paths.

In addition to the selected flight, users can see nearby aircraft.

Flightradar24’s real-time data provides vital information to millions of users every month—a use case Cesium was specifically designed to support. Learn how to build a 3D flight tracker like this, with real data from FlightRadar24.

Track the World's Commercial Air Traffic with Flightradar24's CesiumJS App

UsPLM, with Cesium ion, is giving drone fleet managers the tools to keep drones flying as long and as safely as possible. With visualizations built on CesiumJS, their web-based software makes it easy to review mission performance over time and to quickly assess individual drones by examining high resolution digital twins.

Keeping an entire fleet of drones running involves numerous processes: asset tracking, operational overviews, flight logs analyses, mission planning, real-time simulation, forensics analysis, and regulatory compliance. UsPLM brings these many processes together with a focus on product lifecycle data management of unmanned aircrafts and their payloads.

CesiumJS powers two of these key elements: 3D Mission Review and 3D Asset Review. UsPLM says of working with Cesium:

“We have found CesiumJS such a powerful engine and ideal enabler to present and track drone fleet data at any granularity level as well as along the life cycle spectrum of any component.”

Time dynamic visualization for mission review

UsPLM’s Mission Review module combines their proprietary data analytics pipelines with CesiumJS’s time-dynamic data streaming capabilities to verify mission performance and conduct forensic analysis. Users can see historical performance of any given flight, shown in 3D over Cesium World Terrain.

USPLM 3D Mission Review

USPLM 3D Mission Review: Imagery footprint analysis for a DJI Phantom 4 mission.

USPLM 3D Mission Review: Path deviation analysis for a Yuneec H520 mission.

UsPLM’s Asset Review module provides users with high-resolution 3D digital twins, created from glTF models. Users can interact with the key components of an unmanned aircraft, view aggregate performance over historical missions, and find maintenance advisories for key components.

3D Asset Review - DJI Phantom 4

UsPLM 3D Asset Review: Maintenance advisory for a DJI Phantom 4 drone.

UsPLM 3D Asset Review: Warning for a Yuneec H520 hexacopter.

3D Asset Review - Yuneec H520

UsPLM Manages Drone Fleets More Accurately and Safely with Cesium

PX4 is an open source autopilot for drones and other unmanned vehicles. As part of that ecosystem, Flight Reviewis a web service that allows anyone to upload drone flight logs. Flight Review displays interactive 2D plots of flight data, such as IMU sensor data, the vehicle’s orientation, or battery level. It also allows a user to view and replay the flight in 3D. Together, the 2D plots and the 3D view provide insights into what the vehicle was doing and help with finding problems and improving the flight software and vehicle setup.

The 3D view makes use of Cesium, including 3D terrain data. An overlay visualizes a remote control that is synchronized to the timeline and shows the pilot’s commands. Having the maps and 3D terrain helps to put the flight trajectory into perspective. The 3D view is useful to analyze crashes and reconstruct what happened as it is possible to pause, seek in time, and change the replay speed. Check out an example log.

Beat Küng is the main author and maintainer of Flight Review, working for Auterion. Flight Review is open source. Contributions are welcome!

Replay Drone Flights in 3D with Flight Review

Trendspek allows asset managers to digest ultra high resolution digital twins in their web browser. This allows inspections to be conducted remotely, boosting productivity and profitability for anyone responsible for the management or maintenance of physical assets. They create these high resolution datasets using refined capture techniques and aerial imagery acquired with drones.

Trendspek adopted Cesium to enable support of the 3D Tile specification. They have used Cesium to develop a range of incredibly powerful tools including measurements, annotations, and timeline viewers to compare tilesets. Users are able to extract an original full resolution image of any point in a tileset with a simple right click.

Trendspek builds a culture of collaboration using chat and messaging functionality. End users can comment, tag and respond to communications made about specific assets and even specific annotations. They aim to enhance predictive maintenance by closely monitoring trends and have built tools using Cesium that allow users to view models side by side and observe critical differences. Trendspek refines users’ understanding of an ever changing asset.

Trendspek drone data platform for asset inspection and management

Trendspek: Transforming How Physical Assets are Managed through Automation and Drone Technology

The ActiveFlight application shows current, historical, or simulated flight paths along with present or historical weather. Developed by the William J. Hughes Technical Center at the Federal Aviation Administration, ActiveFlight visualizes weather data alongside historical flight tracks, allowing usrs to analyze potential interactions.

To demonstrate how a flight interacted with the weather it encountered, ActiveFlight accesses a local proximity service that combines the flight position with a value ranging from 0 to 6, which represents its proximity to weather at that time.

Display of weather on the Cesium globe begins with accessing a service that delivers NetCDF or GRIB data files for various weather types, such as reflectivity, turbulence, or icing. After converting to either point cloud or batched 3D model with embedded glTF v2.0 formatted tiles, the 3D Tile resource is hosted as a local service. On the client side, upon request, the Cesium 3D Tiles API and Cesium3DTileset is used to access the url source of the tileset.json. An altitude property value used for declarative styling is embedded in each returned layer and allows the client to select the visibility of a single altitude layer or all layers at once.

To depict multiple simultaneous flights, the application uses Cesium’s SampledPositonProperty. Points along each flight path are modeled this way, allowing for the Cesium clock to control flight animations. Various weather products may be represented, not as flat images on the earth surface, but as layer data at their actual elevation.

New technologies such as 3D Tiles and the ability to create a 3D point cloud representation of weather data will be useful visualization tools in a variety of areas, including historical flight analysis, accident investigations, safety analysis, and research.

ActiveFlight: Multi-Layered Weather and Flight Path Visualization with 3D Tiles

Flights-pro is related to the Simpro-scene project. It uses Protege to represent knowledge and data and Rete4frames expert systems shell for intelligent information processing.

Flights-pro is both a simulator and an air traffic control system. It receives data on real air traffic from Flightradar-24, which is also powered by Cesium, and displays them on a 2D map in the browser window using Leaflet. Flights-pro performs analytics, such as determining whether an aircraft’s approach is dangerous, assessing the state of aircraft (e.g., take-off, landing, level), measuring the range to airports, and other tasks. The Flights-pro system allows users to plan and execute their own flights from one airport to another. In addition, users can make their own free-hand flight by piloting a plane from the cabin.

Flights-pro uses Cesium to represent the view from the cockpit. Users can be in the cockpit of any aircraft displayed on the map and can freely move from one plane to another. Also, users can view from the cabin in any direction (forward, backward, up, down, etc.). In addition to viewing the surrounding landscape, users can see other aircraft from the cockpit, which are shown as different colors and sizes. Users can control their own plane’s movements by entering data into the autopilot. The system can be used by pilots to study air traffic in the airport area and for training.

Users can adjust or further program the project, as shown on the project site.

Flights-pro JFK BAW173a

Display Flight Simulator and Air Traffic Control Systems Simultaneously with Flights-pro

Sputnik Web, created by Geoscan, is a GIS application powered by Cesium that allows users to visualize 3D models of data captured with UAVs. Sputnik Web automatically creates 3D models from georeferenced photos taken by drones and other UAVs. Processing is done with Agisoft PhotoScan. There’s no limit to the file size, allowing highly detailed models.

Users can also upload KML/KMZ, GeoTIFF, SHP, PJR and TLS files, as well as data from WMS/WMTS servers. Sputnik Web can represent any uploaded data as layers over a single location and includes measurement capabilities for height, length, area, and volume. Users can make their visualizations private or shared, and can embed visualizations in other web pages.

Check out the examples on Sputnik Web, including Saint Petri Church in Sweden and Vyborg Castle in Russia.

Create 3D Models from Data Captured by Drones with Sputnik Web

Systems Toolkit (STK), created by Analytical Graphics, Inc. (AGI), is used to model complex systems for aerospace and defense applications. AGI’s Analytical Services uses STK Components to provide accurate time and coordinate representation as well as advanced analysis features such as route planning, visibility between objects, and communication and navigation analyses. Analytical Services provides an analytical back-end to any web-aware application, allowing for advanced analysis with simple web service calls. All of these apps demonstrate how to produce output in Cesium, bringing analysis to 3D visualization.

Analytical Services currently offers apps in the following areas. These demonstrate some of the functionality in Analytical Services.

The Unmanned Traffic Management (UTM) application provides UAV operators and planners an application that allows them to plan flights (both local and beyond visual line-of-sight) and monitor them in real-time. The Analytical Services provide REST interfaces that the UTM employs to assess planned or real-time flight routes for navigation errors, terrain intersections, and FAA airspace incursions.

The Communication System Link Budget service allows users to set up a transmitter, receiver, and any number of interference sources (jammers), each along any supported path, and receive link budget information for the receiver by time. This can help you understand where communication links are weaker and stronger.

With the Satellite Pass app, users can see details about satellites’ locations. They can view a satellite’s orbit over time, view a list of countries a satellite flies over, with entry and exit times, see when select satellites are within view, and see the pass visualized in Cesium. This demonstration application shows how you might use the Analytical Services Satellite Passes and Overflight web service calls.

The GPS Services app performs navigation accuracy calculations over a wide-range of options, including sites, routes, and search patterns. Users can view today’s maximum navigation accuracy over the entire world, view today’s current navigation accuracy using an animated heat map, and view all current GPS satellites, including their block type and current health status.

Analyze and Visualize Defense, and Intelligence Systems with AGI's Analytical Services

OneSky provides a fusion of web-based visualization with back-end API analytics to bring enhanced flight-planning and safety analytics to commercial drone operators. OneSky’s UAS Traffic Management (UTM) platform provides UAV operators and planners an application to plan flights (both local and beyond visual line-of-sight) and monitor them in real-time. Built on top of AGI’s Analytical Services, the OneSky UTM solution provides REST interfaces for users to assess planned or real-time flight routes and consider aspects such as navigation errors, communication link margins, and FAA airspace incursions.

Cesium’s 3D visualization brings a level of situational awareness to OneSky users that would otherwise be lost if only relying on 2D mapping solutions. Seeing the operational picture with 3D airspace volumes and terrain impacts helps users understand the real-world considerations that must be made when introducing their aircraft into the national airspace.

OneSky Brings Flight Planning and Safety Analysis to the Commercial Drone Industry

GeoFS started nearly six years ago. With the increasing quality of aerial images offered by Google Earth and as an aviation (and simulators) enthusiast, I felt frustrated that no flight simulator made good use of this data and decided to build my own. The goal of GeoFS was, and still is, to give users simple access to flying within these environments and the chance to enjoy the view. GeoFS grew more sophisticated as more people started to enjoy it, too. Today, it offers about sixteen aircraft ranging from the Piper Cub to Concorde and A380. Some aircraft are fitted with virtual cockpit rendering.

GeoFS is massively multi-player: users can see and chat with other players. Is also includes joystick support, autopilot, wind system, sound and light effects, replay mode, a map of restricted airspace, and a selection of over 30,000 referenced runways to take off from. The physics engine aims to be as realistic as possible while trying the keep the experience enjoyable for every skill level.

The application was originally built on top of the Google Earth plugin and has only recently been ported to Cesium. Porting to Cesium has been relatively straightforward. My code base abstracts enough of the underlying API to allow for an easy replacement. One of the best things resulting from the migration was that GeoFS now runs (and rather well) on mobile platforms. Running a native web technology is also much more logical and comfortable: using a Javascript debugger was a real burden with the NPAPI plugin but is as natural as it should be when using Cesium. Some major differences, however, led to some parts of GeoFS being entirely rewritten. For example, what are known as “Overlays” in the Google Earth plugin had to be replaced (this turned out to be for the best) with native HTML/CSS3 animations. Complex aviation instruments are being rendered with this technique, and performance was a concern but proved, eventually, to be very satisfactory.

Cesium is a relatively young platform, and the inevitable quirks had to be dealt with. But this is where the open source approach is making a real difference: I could easily browse through the code to understand problems, and even fix them myself if needed. And of course, much improvement and growth is expected in the near future. The API documentation has proven to be very good, and there are now plenty of examples to get inspiration from. Overall performance and stability are very satisfying, without much effort put into optimization.

Access Global, Photorealistic Flight Simulation with GeoFS

BridgeNet International, located in Newport Beach, California, provides consulting and software development services for airports and airport authorities around the world. Their services are primarily related to noise studies, analysis and reporting of aircraft operations near airports, flight procedure visualization, analysis and development, and the visualization of flight and noise data.

BridgeNet’s Volans software was developed in Java using NASA’s WorldWind to provide 3D display and analysis of procedures and flight operations for airports and airport authorities. However, the continuous advancement of browser capabilities and technologies has convinced them that browser-based applications will play an increasingly important role in providing simple and powerful solutions for their customers. To this end they are using Cesium to develop browser-based versions of their software that provide solutions accessible to anyone.

The Volans site for the San Francisco International Airport provides the public with an interactive tool used to view information about local aircraft operations and noise (both near real-time and historic). They have created similar sites for other airports including John Wayne Airport in Orange County, California and Heathrow Airport in London.

Volans: A Public Portal for Viewing Flight Data, Noise and Other Airport Information

The Propeller Platform creates highly accurate data visualizations from aerial imagery acquired by drones. Work sites and assets can be explored, measured, and annotated in 2D and 3D maps, as well as in point clouds and photo inspection models. Propeller Platform is used for site design and progress tracking, land surveying, remote asset inspections, and stockpile management, to name a few applications.

Propeller’s viewer allows side-by-side viewing and navigation of 3D map data and the original photos that the drone captured. The map is built on top of Cesium and allows rendering of the various types of 3D data generated from the photos, including orthophotos, accurate terrain, point clouds, and contours. Interactive tools allow users to measure from points, lines, areas, and volumes directly on the Cesium map. Measured quantities are visualized in Cesium using custom geometry, and the shapes used also show in the photos. This helps users understand what is actually being measured. Some of Propeller’s users capture their sites daily or weekly, so a timeline control allows them to see how their site is changing over time. There are also reporting features including output to PDF and CSV.

Propeller Platform: Software for Drone Surveys and Inspections

As a kid, D.T.C. Wee, the developer ofSoarer, dreamed of flight. He devoured PC flight sims, from Microsoft’s in the ’80s to the more recentGEFS(another fine Cesium application). But he wanted a more visceral experience, to point somewhere and fly there within seconds. No worrying about stalling, instrumentation, or atmospherics.

Timely advances in technology enabled him to develop the flight experience he’d dreamed of. Simply put, Soarer is Cesium with tilt controls. On top of the full range of Cesium’s imagery library, features include a dynamic day/night cycle, compatibility from Android Chrome to iOS Safari, supplementary keyboard controls, and VR mode through Google Cardboard.

He appreciated Cesium’s comprehensive documentation, tutorials, and samples and was relieved to develop with new device orientation browser standards (i.e., Javascript) as opposed to a more demanding native app platform (e.g., Android). The screenshots above are from iPad and Samsung Galaxy S3.

Experience the Sensation of Flight on Your Mobile Device with Soarer

FlightAirMap is an open-source project displaying aircraft on 2D and 3D maps, developed by Ycarus from Zugaina. The code is available on GitHub.

You can browse through the data based on a particular aircraft, airline, or airport to search through the database or see extensive statistics. FlightAirMap can use ADS-B, to track real flights, or it can use some flights simulators and flight-simulation networks as source to track virtual flights.

With the help of Cesium, FlightAirMap displays flights on a map using 3D models of aircraft in binary glTF format. Spacecrafts with 3D models can also be displayed in real time.

Free and Open-Source Live Flight Tracking with FlightAirMap

Kansas Department of Transportation officials selected Burns & McDonnell to develop the Kansas Aviation Portal, a planning tool that represents in 3D the imaginary surfaces of local airspace. This tool promotes protection of the local public airport, improves management of airport funding and economic impacts, and increases awareness of the surrounding airspace.

Developed on Cesium with an ArcGIS Server backend, the portal allows users to interactively evaluate proposed structures’ potential impact on existing airspace. Originally built on the Google Earth API, deprecation required rebuilding the application on Cesium. Work continues as KDOT continues to find new capabilities to explore using the new Portal.

The airspace surfaces were developed according to the geometric descriptions outlined in FAR Part 77 – Objects Affecting Navigable Airspace. These surfaces may vary, depending on the type of instrument approach or the visibility minimums available at the airport. The Portal allows users to easily perform preliminary evaluations with immediate results. Furthermore, local governments use the Portal to clearly define and understand the boundaries of their airspace to facilitate public education as well as create local height and hazard regulations to further protect the airport.

Additionally, the tool allows easy access to System Plan and Economic Plan Analysis and reports. Further, airport owners can view and return information about the condition of their runways by viewing pavement data obtained from the ongoing Pavement Management Program.

2012 ACEC National Honors Award for Engineering Excellence

2012 National Association of State Aviation Officials’ Most Innovative Program Award

2012 President’s Award in Aviation from the American Association of State Highway Transportation Officials

2013 Official Google Earth Project Showcase

For more information contact Jamie Katz at Burns & McDonnell Engineering.

Use Kansas Aviation Portal to Visualizes Airspaces

Flight Club, built and maintained by Declan Murphy, is a tool for visualizing the trajectory of orbital rockets on their way to orbit from the launch pad. It also plots the trajectory of stages attempting to land softly after launches. The user controls the flight profile, which includes specifying launch pad, launch vehicle, ignition sequences, guidance maneuvers, separation events, and more. Flight Club calculates the trajectory based on the user’s custom input data and builds interactive plots for the more significant telemetry data. There are also some pre-built profiles available, based on recent real missions, which users can use to get started.

Users can also view the trajectory of a mission develop in real time alongside actual rocket launches from companies like SpaceX. This is where Cesium comes in: the trajectory is plotted in three dimensions with the Cesium engine. Multiple terrains are used to simultaneously identify fine details such as the launch pad or launch vehicle, as well as wider view features such as debris hazard areas. View a replay of a typical mission on Flight Club.

Flight Club | CRS-8 | 2016-04-08

Simulate Orbital Rocket Launches and Landings with Flight Club

Flightradar24 is a flight tracking service that provides real-time information about thousands of flights. The service collects data from a number of sources to show the real-time location of aircraft all over the world, including more than 95% of commercial flights. Users can also view details about each flight, such as speed, destination, and arrival time. Since it was first launched in 2006, Flightradar24 has grown considerably; this popular app has been downloaded more than 30 million times, and each month Flightradar24.com is visited more than 45 million times.

Flightradar24’s 3D view was originally built on Google Earth and has since migrated to Cesium. The move has allowed Flightradar24 to be viewed on a wider array of devices, without a plugin.

As part of the move to Cesium, Flightradar24 has developed a more immersive 3D view. In addition to providing a cockpit view, the new 3D view also allows users to track flights from outside the plane, which is represented by a 3D model. See their aircraft models in glTF format on GitHub. Users can pan and zoom to see the flight from any angle and watch detailed scenery pass beneath.

Use Flightradar24 for Real-time Flight Tracking for Thousands of Aircraft Worldwide

The LiveTrack24 service provides real-time visualization of airsport flights and competitions. It allows anyone to use a tracking device or a phone to send information to a central server, which can then be displayed on a map, allowing others to follow their position. With LiveTrack24 services, friends and family can follow an athlete’s activities in real time during races, or when flying or training.

LiveTrack24 is available on PC, Mac, tablets, smartphones, and even older mobile phones. The app processes incoming live tracking data from apps, devices, and servers to generate real-time information, and then displays the results in various ways.

While flying, users can see in real time who is around them as well as other athletes’ status, speed, altitude, distance, and direction. The LiveTrack24 app can also be used as a simple GPS device, giving speed, altitude, and course readings. After a flight, the pilot or athlete can replay the track and analyze it with advanced tools.

LiveTrack24 also offers integral solutions for organizers to manage events and competitions, including real-time tracking, live scoreboards, and retrieval, with easy set up and quick updates via PC, smartphone, or SMS, as well as push and pull task turn points to apps and devices. Automatic news and task updates via Facebook and Twitter can attract more fans to watch a competition live. These tools also enhance the spectator experience, as they can follow the task in multiple viewing options.

LiveTrack24 initially used the Google Earth API for 3D visualizations, but it recently moved to Cesium. Once they got up to speed, the designers found Cesium to be much more efficient and fast, making it possible to display many more tracked entities with even less CPU/GPU overhead. Also, working on mobile devices was a big big plus! What impressed them the most is the well thought-out design for handling time series.

Real-time Visualization of Airsport Flights and Competitions with LiveTrack24

Following the disastrous earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan March 11, 2011, helicopters searched for those in need of rescue. However, the tsunami changed the very geography of the land, so rescuers could not locate features on a map, and operations proved extremely difficult. Since then, the R & D department at Northern System Service Co. has developed LSD-SLAM, useful for such cartographical emergencies.

Built on Cesium, LSD-SLAM allows users to create a three-dimensional map from video captured by a drone and to display that map in real time. With SfM (structure from motion) technology, and a lot of time, it’s possible to create an accurate 3D map from photos taken by a drone. However, this can only be achieved after the drone has finished flying. With LSD-SLAM, this is possible in real time.

First, users create point clouds by passing real-time video from the drone to LSD-SLAM via ROS. LSD-SLAM stands for ”Large-Scale Direct Monocular Simultaneous Localization and Mapping.” It allows users to create a point cloud map in real time using video taken from a monocular camera. Able to handle large-scale maps, LDS-SLAM is ideal for real-time map creation.

The raw point cloud data output from LSD-SLAM can become very large very quickly. So for LSD-SLAM, an interface program sends point cloud difference data to Cesium in units of key frames. This interface program outputs point cloud difference data, which is then acquired by Cesium to display point cloud data in real time.

lsd-slam to cesium on realtime point cloud rendring

Display Point Cloud Data from LSD-SLAM in Real Time with LSD-SLAM

This is a guest post by Andrew Simpson of CloudAhoy about their transition from Google Earth to Cesium. For more info on moving from the GE plugin to Cesium, see the tutorial series. - Sarah

CloudAhoy is a web application for pilots to debrief their flights. During the flight we capture GPS and other data via the user’s iPhone, iPad, Android, external GPS device, or the aircraft avionics. This data is uploaded to our servers, where we combine it with additional aeronautical data and process it all by the CloudAhoy engine.

After landing, the pilot can review the flight in detail. The flight can be visualized statically over 2D or 3D maps, or dynamically by a motion visualization that displays a synthetic view from the cockpit. We break the track into recognizable segments of flight (takeoffs, landings, maneuvers, etc.), provide graphs for each parameter of flight, allow the user to import and sync video, display wind barbs, overlay instrument procedures, recreate the flight in a virtual cockpit view with a heads-up display, change the POV, and more, all useful for detailed debrief.

We’d been using Google Earth plugin and it worked well, with some ongoing issues: the user had to download the plugin, which was very inconvenient. It would sometimes crash unexpectedly, forcing the user to reload the browser. Also, Google Earth is supported only on Windows and Mac platforms, meaning that on tablet we could only implement our 2D view, even though many of our users use our service primarily on tablets.

With the announcement that Google Earth would be deprecated in December 2015, it became clear we needed an alternative. Chuck, our founder, stumbled upon Cesium and we started the development work. The benefits were very alluring: no plugin to install, a crossplatform solution, and a responsive community of developers. Here’s some tips we learned from our experience to help your migration.

Our 3D track mode allows users to view their flight track on a virtual earth and rotate around it, zoom in, pan, etc.

Drawing the flight track itself is pretty simple. We loop through each segment of flight and add a polyline entity for each, populated with the GPS positions for that segment,

```js
viewer.entities.add( {
  polyline: {
    positions: Cesium.Cartesian3.fromDegreesArrayHeights( positions ),
    width: 3,
    material: Cesium.Color.fromCssColorString( cssColor )
 }
} );
```

where positions is an array containing [ lon, lat, alt, lon, lat, alt, etc. ] for all the GPS positions in the flight segment, and cssColor is a variable containing something like #ff0000, or whatever CSS color code is associated with the current segment.

However, this only draws a flight track above the ground; it doesn’t connect the surface to the track, as we had with Google Earth (by setting the extrude flag). So we also draw a wall below the line. A wall in Cesium is like a line, but 1) connected from the line positions to the surface and 2) not visible from directly above.

We draw a wall after we draw the line for the flight track, like so:

```js
viewer.entities.add( {
  wall: {
    positions: Cesium.Cartesian3.fromDegreesArrayHeights( positions ),
    material: Cesium.Color.fromCssColorString( cssColor )
  }
} );
```

Positions and color for the wall are the same as those applied to the polyline. This yields a flight track that is visible from directly above as well as from the side.

Some of the challenges we faced as part of the migration were resolved thanks to Cesium’s monthly releases, which got issues we raised fixed right away. Early on during the migration of our 3D track we encountered a bug with the entity system that was difficult to pin down because it was timing-dependent. Our flight tracks were often not drawn correctly, and sometimes not drawn at all. We submitted a reproducible scenario to Cesium’s github issues list, using code that could be pasted into their Sandcastle environment, and the Cesium team promptly responded. They identified a race condition that was causing the problem and fixed it in their next release, 1.7, which was published a few weeks later.

In track mode you can click on any segment of flight and the app will zoom into it. In Google Earth we usedcreateLookAt/setAbstractViewto accomplish this. In Cesium we useflyToBoundingSphere, because it allows us to specify all the parameters we need, longitude, latitude, altitude, heading, pitch, and range:

```js
var destination = Cesium.Cartesian3.fromDegrees( lon, lat, alt );
var sphere = new Cesium.BoundingSphere( destination );
viewer.camera.flyToBoundingSphere( sphere, {
  offset: new Cesium.HeadingPitchRange( heading, pitch, range )
} );
```

That is, we first create aCartesian3object from our longitude, latitude, and altitude, then create a BoundingSphere object from those coordinates, then callflyToBoundingSpherewith the bounding sphere and aHeadingPitchRangeobject created from our heading, pitch, and range variables. The camera then animates to the specified location.

CloudAhoy also allows the user to overlay “instrument approaches,” predetermined courses that pilots to follow land while in conditions with low to no visibility. We simply fed the same KML we used with Google Earth into Cesium:

```js
var source = new Cesium.KmlDataSource();
var parsedKml = new DOMParser().parseFromString( kml, ‘application/kml’ );
source.load( parsedKml );
viewer.dataSources.add( source );
```

However, we came across one caveat: when the <coordinates> tag is empty in the KML, it causes a problem with Cesium’s KML mechanism. Our solution was to simply remove any empty <coordinates> tags. The issue has been promptly fixed by Cesium.