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Cesium for Omniverse v0.25.0

Cesium for Unity Samples v1.16.0

CesiumJS 1.129

Federal & Defense

Cesium ion SaaS and Cesium ion Self-Hosted utilize containers to provide Cesium ion. Containers are cloud-native, lightweight, and stand-alone software packages that include everything needed to run a piece of software: the code, runtime, system tools, libraries, and settings. This encapsulation ensures that the software runs consistently across various computing environments, from development to testing and production, regardless of the underlying infrastructure. At the heart of any container is the base image, and Cesium has recently updated base images to use the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Universal Base Image as deployed by Iron Bank. Because containers are smaller than virtual machines, it reduces the surface area to patch and update as part of the software stack. 

Containers are smaller than virtual machines, reducing the surface area to patch and update as part of the software stack.

Iron Bank was created and is maintained by the US Department of Defense (DoD)’s Platform One group. The goal of Iron Bank is to provide trusted and vetted container images that can speed up deployment of commercial and open source software across the DoD. This is possible because there is an open process by which images are created and because the images are continuously monitored and continually updated for Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs) as part of the process that builds these images. Trust is an important part of what we do at Cesium, so it’s important that we are able to trust the source of our base container images and that our users are able to trust that we work to ensure a secure product for them. 

CVEs don’t exist only in the base image itself, although that is where most of them are found. To ensure we stay on top of security reports and prevent releasing vulnerabilities to our users, Cesium also scans for CVEs. CVEs are tracked through various internet databases, with contributions by companies, security researchers, and developers. CVEs generally are reported against software as they are discovered and can appear at any layer in your container—the operating system, your build tools, or your software dependencies. At Cesium, we use open source tools like Grype to identify CVEs and then mitigate them by constantly updating our dependencies or removing unnecessary pieces of software from our containers. We run these tools in our continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines, so that no release happens without security checks. 

Creating a trusted software supply chain 

Another important consideration that has received more attention lately is the software supply chain. People consuming software are now more concerned about where their software comes from, how it’s built, and what other software is packaged inside the software they bought. With Iron Bank as the base image, there is a known and open source of the bottom layers of the container stack, including the system libraries and programs that are built on top of the operating system. 

Additionally, Cesium takes great care to analyze the JavaScript libraries we’re directly dependent on, as well as those that may be nested inside, to ensure that we are looking at what licenses the software is bundled with, if it contains any vulnerabilities, and if there are updates we should be using. To do this, we generate a Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) using Syft, which analyzes not just the software we’re using but also the dependencies of that software. Using those SBOMs and a tool called Grant, we can determine what licenses our dependencies have so that we can avoid any unfavorable licenses. A full view of what this scanning looks like is illustrated below. 

In addition to monitoring for CVEs, Cesium also continually monitors our software for security vulnerabilities through Static Application Security Testing (SAST) and secret scanning. SAST analyzes application code to identify potential security vulnerabilities that can be mitigated prior to release. It looks for things like SQL injection, cross-site scripting, and buffer overflows. Secret scanning helps ensure that authentication parameters are not stored in the code, containers, configuration files, or other areas in the released product. The reports generated from these tools allow us to harden our code and provide assurances to users about the security of the Cesium ion environment. 

Software security can be hard, and it’s important to be vigilant and confident in the measures taken to ensure your software and your users’ data are secure. In addition to vetting our own software, vetting containers and their stacks can be very complex. Fortunately, we can rely on a solid base with Iron Bank and use sophisticated tools from the open source community to ensure that we are always following security best practices. 

Use Cesium ion Self-Hosted to support corporate policies or create air-gapped solutions that meet strict security requirements and can be deployed to remote, disconnected environments. Learn more about using Cesium in your own environment. 

Cesium ion Uses Iron Bank Container Images for Software Security 

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 

Cesium VP of Business Development and Sales Operations Danny Williams has received a Patriot Award from Pennsylvania Employer Support of the Guard and Reserve (ESGR), an office of the US Department of Defense. This award recognizes extraordinary support for employees in the National Guard and Reserve.

The Patriot Award recognizes the combined commitments of Danny and Cesium.

Brady Moore, formerly Director of Mission Support at Cesium and a Major in the US Army Reserve, nominated Danny for the award. Brady serves as an Innovation Officer at 75th Innovation Command in New York City, where he specializes in Dense Urban and Subterranean operations.

“Danny provided exceptional support for my Reserve service. His vocal appreciation created a positive and supportive work environment, and he made sure my responsibilities were covered and my return to work was as smooth as possible,” Brady said.

Major General Wes Craig, Pennsylvania Chair Emeritus and Southeast Area Chair of ESGR, presented the award to Danny at the Cesium office in Philadelphia in December 2024. “It would be difficult for those in the uniformed services to perform their mission without employer support,” he noted.

Wes Craig, Danny Williams, and Brady Moore during the award ceremony.

“We are very honored to be recognized with this award and support those who serve in the Reserve Forces. We appreciate the values, leadership, and unique skills servicemembers bring to the workforce. I’ve worked with veterans and members of the Guard and Reserve throughout my career and have always appreciated the perspective and dedication they bring to their work,” Danny said.

Cesium recognizes that experience comes in many forms and development is continuous. Interested in joining us? Take a look at our open roles.

Danny Williams Honored with Patriot Award

Join Cesium at the Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation, and Education Conference (I/ITSEC) in Orlando, Florida, from December 2-5! I/ITSEC is the world’s largest gathering of professionals in modeling, simulation, and training, and we’re excited to be a part of it once again.

Stop by BOOTH 221 for Cesium demos curated specifically for the modeling, simulation, and training community.

Here’s a preview of what you can expect:

 I/ITSEC is a great opportunity to engage directly with our leadership and engineering teams. We look forward to the opportunity to answer your questions and demonstrate the latest capabilities from Cesium. 

We will also be hosting a Cesium Happy Hour at our booth on Tuesday from 3-5PM.

Announced last year at I/ITSEC, Cesium ion Self Hosted provides an offline capability for hosting, tiling, and streaming massive heterogeneous 3D geospatial datasets. When Cesium customers need to move their solution to the high side or a disconnected environment, Cesium ion Self-Hosted is the way to go. 

At I/ITSEC this year, we will feature a dedicated station where you can get hands-on experience with Cesium ion Self-Hosted. Like what you see and want to try it out in your environment? You can sign up for a free 30-day evaluation of Cesium ion Self-Hosted right at the booth.

Cesium ion, the solution for hosting, tiling, and streaming 3D geospatial data, is now available for your own environment as Cesium ion Self-Hosted.

Cesium ion Self-Hosted

Explore Cesium Global 3D Content and Tiled Partner Data

We’ll also have all the Cesium Global 3D Content offline locally in our booth. This is the same data we ship to our Cesium ion Self-Hosted customers for hosting in their own local environment. 

Interact with these datasets in a Cesium Story hosted locally by Cesium ion Self-Hosted.

Cesium Moon Terrain: the first complete, accurate, and readily-accessible 3D dataset of the moon.

Cesium World Bathymetry:  a global bathymetry and topographic terrain tileset that enables 3D visualizations, simulations, and analytics for use cases like oil and gas exploration, navigation for unmanned undersea vehicles (UUVs), managing offshore wind farms, and analyzing essential climate science.

Japan 3D Buildings and Regional Terrain Data: Providing a foundation for building digital twin applications and solutions in Japan.

Vexcel 3D Cities: High-quality 3D data models for more than 60 metro areas across the globe available for offline use with Cesium ion Self-Hosted.

Live demos of Cesium’s open source plugins for today’s leading creation engines like Unreal Engine and Unity

Built on open standards and APIs, these plugins combine the 3D geospatial capability of Cesium and 3D Tiles with today’s leading creation engines.

Cesium for Unreal - Integrated with Unreal Engine Editor, Actors and Components, Blueprints, and other UE features to enable a high degree of interactivity, physical realism, and photorealism to create amazing experiences.

Cesium for Unity - Cesium for Unity is tightly integrated with Unity making it possible to visualize and interact with real-world content in editor and at runtime. The plugin also has support for Unity game objects, physics, collisions, and character interaction.

Cesium for Omniverse - Cesium for Omniverse enables users to visualize and interact with a full-scale, high fidelity WGS84 globe within NVIDIA Omniverse to create, visualize, and analyze simulations in their precise 3D geospatial context.

Cesium Native - Cesium Native powers Cesium's runtime integrations and is an open source foundational layer for any 3D geospatial software, especially those that want to stream 3D Tiles.

A First Look at Cesium’s all new Design Tiler

To improve workflows and capabilities that place architecture, engineering, construction, and operations (AECO) content in a 3D geospatial context, Cesium has developed a new Design Tiler and Revit Add-In, now available for early access and feedback via our AECO Tech Preview Program.

These tools transform IFC (Industry Foundation Classes) and Revit files into 3D Tiles, the OGC community standard created by Cesium for streaming massive 3D geospatial datasets

Cesium has developed a new Design Tiler and Revit Add-In, now available for early access and feedback via our AECO Tech Preview Program. These tools transform IFC and Revit files into 3D Tiles, the OGC community standard created by Cesium for streaming massive 3D geospatial datasets. Join us in connecting architecture and geospatial.

Connecting Architecture and Geospatial: AECO Tech Preview Program

CesiumJS Example with One World Terrain’s Well Formed Format based on 3D Tiles: 

The past year has seen many great developments for 3D Tiles, including its use by NBC Sports for broadcast coverage of the Paris Summer Games. 

At I/ITSEC, we will be showing how we continue to evolve this OGC Community Standard developed by Cesium including specific enhancements that are part of the U.S. Army’s One World Terrain Contract. Stop by our booth to see live demos of new features in the One World Terrain Well Formed Format (WFF),  an extension of 3D Tiles.

Once again Cesium will bring partners into the booth to showcase how they are utilizing the Cesium Platform. Stay tuned for specific days and times these demos will be shown. 

Air Force Research Lab (AFRL), Gaming Research Integration Learning Laboratory (GRILL)  -  Presenting Glimmer, a VR application with Cesium Moon Terrain. (Wed. 1:30-6 pm; Thurs. 9:30 am- 3 pm)

Battle Road - Presenting AtomEngine, an Earth-scale realtime multiplayer simulation using Cesium World Terrain as well as their custom Cesium for Godot integration. (Tues. noon-6:30 pm; Wed. 9:30 am-1:30 pm)

Reveal - Presenting Farsight, a mobile first platform providing surveillance video, 2D, and 3D geospatial data for use in decentralized, comms-limited environments. (Tues. 2-6:30 pm; Wed. 1-30-6 pm)

Brightline Interactive - Presenting SpatialCore, Leveraging USD to bring AI to 3D environments with Cesium geospatial context. (Mon. 2-6 pm; Tues. noon-2 pm)

LuxCarta - Presenting BrightEarth, a web service that uses AI-enhanced production techniques offering high resolution building and tree extraction from from a range of sub-meter imagery sources rendered with CesiumJS. (Mon. 2-6 pm; Wed. 9:30 am-1:30 pm)

Northrop Grumman - presenting Helix, which uses Cesium for Omniverse to visualize generated synthetic training data. (Thurs. 9:30 am-3 pm)

Stop by BOOTH 221 or reach out to schedule time with the team. We look forward to connecting with you in Orlando!

It’s wildland fire season in the United States. The Lockheed Martin AI Center’s (LAIC) Joint Activity Manager (JAM) provides operational context for active wildland fires, using AI, real-time data, and CesiumJS to stream this 3D visualization to incident commanders.

Overview of Lockheed Martin JAM capability, featuring a sped-up clip of the Vista fire outside of Los Angeles, California. Courtesy Lockheed Martin.

Overview of Lockheed Martin JAM capability, featuring a sped up clip of Vista fire outside of Los Angeles, CA. Courtesy Lockheed Martin.

Lockheed Martin JAM - Vista, CA, July 2024

While still in development, this capability is intended for state agencies to visualize and analyze active wildland fires; track flights of aerial assets that have been tasked with detection, monitoring, and suppression; and incorporate weather information, such as temperature, humidity, and wind.

The wildland fire incident list in the application is populated every 24 hours with information from the National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC), based in Boise, Idaho, USA, to ensure daily updates on the number and locations of active wildland fires. Imagery from National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites (GOES) is pulled every 30 minutes. 

In an upcoming feature, Lockheed Martin’s AI will detect near-real-time fire hot spots from this imagery and reflect them atop 3D terrain from Cesium every 15-20 minutes. Lockheed Martin uses its “super resolution” AI capabilities to, in effect, add more pixels to the images, which refines them prior to determining the near-real-time fire area from the satellite imagery.

Tracking a Pilatus PC-12 on patrol identifying and mapping wildland fires in CesiumJS. Courtesy Lockheed Martin.

JAM brings together ground, air, and satellite data from NIFC, NOAA, and ADS-B flight trackers (as seen in the image above) and combines them in CesiumJS. State agencies might also have their own assets (e.g., thermal imaging from multi-mission aircrafts) that can be added. The application uses Cesium World Terrain and Bing Maps Aerial imagery streamed as 3D Tiles via Cesium ion, to provide incident commanders and staff an accurate 3D map to enhance the common operating picture. CesiumJS was built for interactive web apps and streaming massive amounts of data—it is lightweight and performant, vital for users receiving rapid updates in the field.

Work on the JAM prototype began in December 2023, and efforts on the current demo started in March 2024. Lockheed Martin, which employs 122,000 people worldwide, assigned five developers on this project. The company selected Cesium and its real-time update capabilities as an efficient, effective tool for visualizing historical wildland fire data. Lockheed Martin continues to leverage commercial partnerships to accelerate development of JAM.

Wind and weather information for an active fire area in CesiumJS. Courtesy Lockheed Martin.

Demo of suppression line visualization in CesiumJS. Courtesy Lockheed Martin.

The crew behind JAM is working toward including all active wildland fires in the US. The alpha version was completed in May 2024, and beta is slated for this summer.

You can fuse your own data with high-resolution terrain and imagery with Cesium ion; get started with a community account.

Lockheed Martin Tracks Wildland Fires with Cesium

Cesium held its inaugural 3D Geospatial Technical Exchange Meeting at Cesium headquarters in Philadelphia on June 25 and 26.

The purpose of the meeting was to bring experts in defense and intelligence together with the 3D Tiles user community to explore the theme, “Streaming 3D Geospatial Data, from Analysis to Mission Execution.”

Speakers from the Cesium team were joined by guest speakers from TAK Product Center,  Army Geospatial Center, Naval Surface Warfare Center, Carderock Division, NVIDIA, Reveal Technology, Epic Games, Maxar, Ansys, and Vexcel Data Program.

Highlights from Cesium's first 3D Geospatial TEM. 

Cesium 3D Geospatial Technical Exchange Meeting 2024

The event kicked off with a video message from Cesium CEO Patrick Cozzi, who spent the week in Alaska as part of the DoD Joint Civilian Orientation Conference (JCOC).  JCOC enables business and community leaders to gain first-hand experience through operations and interactions with troops and military leaders across the US armed forces.

Nathan Frantz, Acting Director of TAK Product Center, then delivered the keynote address. The event also featured live demos by teams from Reveal Technologies and Lockheed Martin. 


Visit our Presentations page for slides presented by Cesium on CesiumJS, Native Runtimes, Cesium ion and Cesium ion Self-Hosted, and Cesium curated 3D data. We also held a session to gather community feedback on the Cesium roadmap. 

This inaugural, invite-only TEM is only the first of many such events we hope to host at Cesium HQ and around the country to foster collaboration around open standards and gather feedback from the user community. Join our mailing list to be notified of upcoming events.

Cesium's Inaugural 3D Geospatial Technical Exchange Meeting

To derive additional value from digital twins, Brightline Interactive’s SpatialCore platform pairs AI and the Cesium for Omniverse extension for spatial computing, empowering enterprise and public sector users to combine massive datasets and perform complex calculations. Spatial computing is the use of accelerated compute to analyze and process spatial data, in order to derive insights, make predictions, and perform calculations on one-for-one digital twins.

Leveraging geospatial datasets for AI training and tuning. Courtesy Brightline Interactive.

SpatialCore’s users face challenges in infrastructure, maintenance and operations, and training and simulation. As planners and engineers consider updating roads or building new ones, for example, they can use a SpatialCore-enabled digital twin to estimate how long a road will last, based on where the road is, what it’s made of, typical weather conditions, annual traffic estimates, the weight of those vehicles, and more. As the inputs change, so do the outputs, visualized and analyzed in immersive 3D.   

Rapid simulation and calculation enable swift decisions. AI is incorporated into NVIDIA Omniverse-powered workflows to aid calculations, reduce the required technical expertise of users, and train both humans and non-human assets (e.g., drones) with a realistic understanding of Earth. 

SpatialCore leverages open data sources and standards for compatibility with a wide range of data and tools. Universal Scene Description (OpenUSD), created by Pixar Animation Studios as an extensible ecosystem for 3D worlds, and 3D Tiles, the Open Geospatial Consortium community standard created by Cesium, are streamed together for precise, scalable 3D scenes for collaboration on a multitude of devices. 

Real-time collaboration connecting and empowering teams. Courtesy Brightline Interactive.

“Global enterprise requires a global substrate. In principle, we can’t do what we’re doing without Cesium ion,” said Tyler Gates, general manager of Brightline Interactive.

SpatialCore employs a variety of data sources and tools for its complete picture. Brightline adds its own datasets and those of its clients, such as point clouds from drone scans, to Cesium ion, for hosting in the cloud, tiling into 3D Tiles, and efficiently streaming growing collections of data to Omniverse-powered applications and workflows. 

SpatialCore also uses Cesium ion to access Google Maps Platform’s Photorealistic 3D Tiles for line-of-sight visualization and Cesium OSM Buildings for building metadata via the Cesium for Omniverse extension. An accurate, full-scale WGS84 globe is included in the extension and enables SpatialCore’s vital calculations and resulting simulations. 

Immersive simulation on top of geospatial data. Courtesy Brightline Interactive.

Brightline Interactive will demo SpatialCore in Cesium’s BOOTH 1831 at GEOINT Symposium 1-5 p.m. ET on Tuesday, May 7, 2024.

Learn more about enabling 3D geospatial capability with Cesium for Omniverse.

Brightline Interactive Uses Cesium for Omniverse for Spatial Computing

Once again, Cesium will sponsor and participate in the nation's largest gathering of GEOINT professionals, the USGIF GEOINT Symposium 2024.

Join us at BOOTH 1831 in Kissimmee, Florida from May 6-8, 2024 to see how Cesium can address the needs of the GEOINT community.

Ansys Integration for Ansys Systems Tool Kit (STK), Ansys Digital Mission Engineering (DME) Component Libraries, and Ansys RF Channel Modeler

Ateo's Spatial Earth simulation in Unity and Apple Vision Pro

Brightline Interactive's Spatial Core Interface digital twin in NVIDIA Omniverse (stay tuned for more) 

French Air Force's CAP160 Heli Lab training simulation in Unreal Engine

Reveal Technology's Farsight platform for 3D geospatial data postprocessing and mission planning

Royal Air Force's Project THEIA Mission Planning and Rehearsal simulation in Unreal Engine

Additional featured demos by SpatialGIS, LSAS Tec, and COMSPOC

And more, including those available for preview on the Mission Support Demo page.

For the first time, Cesium will be demonstrating two all-new and much-requested capabilities for Cesium ion Self-Hosted:

Clipping feature ("clip and ship"): We'll show you how the feature allows users to cut out specific areas of your 3D geospatial data in Cesium ion to use in any visualization that accepts 3D Tiles or glTF. Stay tuned on this. 

Cesium World Bathymetry: A global bathymetry and topographic terrain tileset that enables 3D visualizations, simulations, and analytics by fusing multiple data sources into a single tileset. The dataset includes GEBCO's 2023 global dataset, high-resolution bathymetric data around the world, and topographical terrain for inland coverage, enabling you to build applications that span underwater, over land, and in the air.

Monday, May 6
4 - 4:45 PM, USGIF Vista Hub

Streaming 3D Geospatial Data for Mission Critical Simulations

Building geospatially accurate simulations for advanced operational training is easier and faster than ever due to the adoption of open standards like 3D Tiles. This session will highlight interoperability as a cornerstone for advancing simulation technology in quality, operational readiness, and collaboration, ensuring forces are better prepared for the challenges of modern operations.  

Moderator: Brady Moore, Director of Mission Support, Cesium

Commandant Barthélémy Minier, French Air and Space Force, Head of Helicopter Crew Training Center, Head of innovation for the French Air Force Helicopters

Owen Cahill, Special Projects Portfolio Manager, Reveal Technology

Build with Photorealistic 3D Tiles from Google Maps Platform

Add high resolution insets to Army One World Terrain visualizations with 3D Tiles 1.1

Use real-time 3D graphics collaboration for your simulations in NVIDIA Omniverse

Stop by BOOTH 1831 or reach out to schedule time with the team. We look forward to connecting with you at GEOINT!

Cesium is continuing its long-term partnership with Maxar Intelligence on Phase 4 of the U.S. Army’s One World Terrain Contract. 

One World Terrain (OWT) is part of the Army’s Synthetic Training Environment (STE), an initiative to create a geospatially accurate virtual environment to support training, simulation, and operations. 

Visualizing time dynamic sensor geometries in CesiumJS using Maxar Precision 3D Mesh of Honolulu, HI.

One World Terrain - Sensors, Honolulu, HI

Cesium technology is a key component of the program focused on refining 3D Tiles, the Open Geospatial Consortium community standard created by Cesium for streaming massive heterogeneous 3D geospatial data. 

The One World Terrain Well Formed Format (WFF) is an extension of 3D Tiles, contributing to the program's goals of global accessibility and scalability, delivery of high resolution data, and interoperability. 

Cesium’s efforts towards the program include:

Further development of format capabilities 

Cesium is proud to contribute to providing foundational data like OWT and 3D Tiles, which enables warfighters to carry out operations on the same data used in analysis and planning.

Cesium has supported the OWT contract for nearly 5 years. To learn more about how Cesium can support your federal use case, contact me. 

Cesium Supporting Maxar on One World Terrain

The French Air Force is augmenting training for helicopter pilots, crew members, and medics both in the air and on the ground with VR simulations using Cesium for Unreal.

Student servicemembers train in first- and third-person with Cesium for Unreal. Courtesy French Air Force.

French Air Force VR helicopter training

To minimize physical resources required for helicopter training and to properly prepare ahead of deployment, the French Air Force uses 3D geospatial data and collaboration in virtual reality. What do the terrain and buildings in a certain location look like? Should a pilot turn into the wind or away from it? How will the winch cables behave in different weather and at various altitudes? The French Air Force Heli Lab guides its trainees in answering those questions with accurate data at human scale, so they know what to do when they’re 40 meters above the ground.

The Heli Lab was created in 2019 with minimal funding, relying on free software and simulators with limited capabilities. Although this enabled the lab to imagine the possibilities for efficient training and begin work on its virtual reality program, the simulators could not communicate with troops on the ground, scenes had to be built from scratch, and locations were not precise, as they lacked a global map. 

The lab began using Unreal Engine and Cesium for Unreal to build their own platform in 2021, and in 2022 the team formally introduced the demo. With three people working full-time on the demo, the French Air Force’s helicopter VR training went from technology readiness level (TRL) 1, an idea, to TRL 9, operations, in the span of a year. 

View a trainee has in VR while being pulled up into a helicopter by a winch. Courtesy French Air Force.

The Heli Lab taps into the French Air Force’s drone imagery and videos of an area of interest, using Reality Capture to build that part of the world in 3D. The team adds these high-res insets to Cesium World Terrain and Photorealistic 3D Tiles, accessed via Cesium ion SaaS and streamed as 3D Tiles to Unreal Engine; the lab is now shifting to Cesium ion Self-Hosted, to securely host classified areas. 3D models of rotary wing aircraft enhance the trainings’ authenticity, ensuring crews learn on the helicopters that are available to them. Cesium for Unreal pairs 3D geospatial data with Unreal Engine’s high-fidelity rendering power, making their VR training program smooth and accurate. 

With student servicemembers around the globe, learning with each other in simulation pods in France or via headsets in Gabon, having realistic training in a single accurate simulation is vital. The lab qualifies 18 pilots, 6-10 winch operators, and 6-10 medics each year. Current helicopter crew students are using the VR program as 30-50% of their training.

Initiatives like this one—starting from pockets of innovation from armed forces subject matter experts solving their challenges in a short loop by leveraging commercially available technologies—are beginning to take hold in service branches worldwide. 

The French Air Force adds high-res insets to Cesium World Terrain and Photorealistic 3D Tiles. Courtesy French Air Force.

The Heli Lab’s VR training program will enable other teams to add and share their own datasets, broadening the reach of the platform and improving training and mission planning across the French Air Force with accurate 3D data for next-gen education and preparation. 

Meet strict security requirements with Cesium ion Self-Hosted: hosting, tiling, and streaming for massive heterogeneous 3D data in your own environment. To build your own global-scale applications in VR using Cesium for Unreal, including for mission-critical situations, follow our VR Series for Geospatial Apps.

French Air Force Uses Cesium for Unreal for VR Helicopter Training

We’re delighted to announce Cesium World Bathymetry, a new global tileset that opens up visualization and analysis of underwater environments. Cesium World Bathymetry enables exciting and wide-ranging 3D visualizations and simulations for use cases like oil and gas exploration, navigation by unmanned undersea vehicles (UUVs), managing offshore wind farms, and analyzing essential climate science. 

Cesium World Bathymetry, a new global tileset that opens up visualization and analysis of underwater environments.

Cesium World Bathymetry

Cesium World Bathymetry includes land terrain for exploring coastal areas, complementing Cesium World Terrain’s global land terrain coverage. It fuses multiple open data sources into a single bathymetry and topographic terrain tileset, including GEBCO's global dataset and incorporating higher resolution data around the world up to 1m resolution. 

Hawaii coastline in Cesium World Bathymetry

Cesium World Bathymetry is easy to access and use. Just sign into Cesium ion SaaS, add Cesium World Bathymetry to My Assets, and begin streaming into CesiumJS, Cesium for Unreal, Cesium for Unity, Cesium for Omniverse, and other 3D engines. To stream from your own environment, Cesium World Bathymetry can also be licensed with Cesium ion Self-Hosted.

The following clip illustrates several CesiumJS options useful for bathymetry visualization. 

Bathymetry off the coast of the Philippines, visualized with CesiumJS

CesiumJS and Cesium Global Bathymetery - Philippines

This is just the beginning! In the coming months, look for enhancements to CesiumJS, Cesium for Unreal, Cesium for Unity, and Cesium for Omniverse that make it easier to build visually stunning apps. We also plan to include additional high-resolution data for areas of particular interest around the globe. 

If you have feedback or requests, or are interested in hosting Cesium World Bathymetry in your own environment, Contact us. 

The Mariana Trench in Cesium World Bathymetry

Cesium ion, the solution for hosting, tiling, and streaming 3D geospatial data, is now available for your own environment as Cesium ion Self-Hosted. Use Cesium ion Self-Hosted to meet corporate policy requirements or create air-gapped solutions that meet strict security requirements that can be deployed to remote, disconnected environments.

Cesium ion Self-Hosted offers all the features of Cesium ion SaaS including:

Best available tilers for optimizing your data as 3D Tiles, the OGC community standard created by Cesium

Integrations with CesiumJS, Cesium for Unreal, Cesium for Unity, and Cesium for Omniverse make it easy to build apps for the Web and game engines

Fuse your own data with optional curated global 3D terrain, buildings, and imagery 

Cesium Stories: Our no-code solution for easily creating and sharing interactive 3D geospatial presentations

User-friendly UI for managing 3D geospatial content and enabling collaboration

Cesium ion Self-Hosted is easy to integrate into your environment via a REST API and connection with your identity provider using SAML. It is deployed on Kubernetes, which provides scalability, unified infrastructure management, and the flexibility to deploy to commercial Cloud services like AWS, your own data center, or edge devices near where you capture data.

We recently demonstrated Cesium ion Self-Hosted at I/ITSEC 2023, the world's largest modeling, simulation, and training event. Cesium ion was installed on a NUC, a small, portable server that can be accessed by computers on a local network. This setup illustrated the potential for Cesium ion Self-Hosted to support remote and disconnected requirements, such as for drone data capture, visualization, and analytics in areas without network service.

“We’re encouraged by the demand and enthusiasm we saw at I/ITSEC for this offering and we’re eager to see what the 3D geospatial community builds now that the full range of Cesium ion capabilities is available in self-hosted deployments,” said Cesium CEO Patrick Cozzi.

Combining Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles from Cesium ion SaaS with an asset from Cesium ion Self-Hosted. 

Self-Hosted Add Assets

We’ve improved the Quick Add panels for Cesium for Unreal and other Cesium plugins to allow developers to access content in Cesium ion Self-Hosted as well as Cesium ion SaaS. You can even connect to multiple Cesium ion accounts at the same time to build apps that combine SaaS-only content like Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles with content you manage in Cesium ion Self-Hosted. 

Download the Cesium ion Self-Hosted one-pager.

Many thanks to the members of the Cesium community who participated in the testing and evaluation of Cesium ion Self-Hosted during the initial trial period.

Cesium ion Self-hosted can be licensed together with Cesium global 3D content, including Cesium World Terrain. Contact sales to learn more, or try Cesium ion SaaS now.

The UK’s Royal Air Force (RAF) has been preparing troops for some missions with immersive XR simulations in Cesium for Unreal.

RAF collaborated with VRAI to build its Virtual All-Domain Environment (VADE) mission planning and rehearsal system for both aircrews and operators on the ground. Defense planners can view operating areas, such as patrol routes, in typical light and with predictive weather conditions, providing critical situational awareness prior to deployment. 

Kabul, Afghanistan, in RAF’s VADE, built on Cesium for Unreal. Courtesy UK Royal Air Force.

VADE began as a demo in 2021 and is still considered a proof of concept, but it was quickly applied to operational training—accurate, shareable 3D geospatial context enables better decisions. Users have been able to rehearse parachute assaults, visualize adversary equipment, and inspect potential evacuation routes at a 1:1 scale in XR, gaining a deeper understanding of locations and capabilities. VADE has been used in planning recent evacuations.

Through a suite of tools, users can rehearse parachute drops in VR in VADE, simulating the view they can expect to see through night vision goggles at their desired altitude. Courtesy UK Royal Air Force.

“How can I surmise this: through the darkness I was not met with the usual confusion of a compound I had imagined from above, but instead could instantly recognise the situation and orientate myself within milliseconds. One could argue this, on occasion, is the difference between success and failure,” said one VADE user.

Maxar Technologies Precision3D 3D Surface Model is visualized within VADE. The ability to ingest this kind of data enables users to immerse themselves fully in any location around the world. Courtesy UK Royal Air Force.

Cesium ion enables VADE to be data agnostic, as the system can ingest various large datasets and render them in high fidelity quickly and accurately. Data from several sources comes together in VADE via Cesium for Unreal: Cesium World Terrain; Maxar Precision3D 3D Surface Model; imagery from Sentinel-2, Bing Maps Aerial, and the UK Ministry of Defence; Reveal Farsight models; photogrammetry from VRAI; and data from OpenStreetMap are hosted on Cesium ion On-Premises and tiled into 3D Tiles for streaming into Unreal Engine. With Cesium ion On-Prem, data is hosted offline and locally, ensuring security for RAF.

Defense planners can view operating areas in typical light and with predictive weather conditions. Pictured is London. Courtesy UK Royal Air Force.

To bolster situational awareness and modernize military planning and education, RAF uses Cesium to bring together better data, which can enable better decisions. Bring 3D geospatial to your mission-critical apps.

Royal Air Force Plans Operations in XR with Cesium for Unreal

Cesium will be exhibiting from November 27 to December 1 at the Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation and Education Conference (I/ITSEC), the world's largest modeling, simulation, and training event, in Orlando, Florida. 