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User Stories

Last month Camptocamp released Geo Challenge, a browser-based game built on CesiumJS that challenges users to identify randomly selected locations in Switzerland, France, or Germany.

Geo Challenge awards players points based on how close their guesses are to a 3D view’s actual location. Courtesy Camptocamp.

The game uses high precision datasets—swisstopo’s high‑resolution topographic data for Switzerland and Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles served by Cesium ion for France and Germany. The game is purely for fun, but the simple interface belies the sophistication of the massive datasets, 3D tiling pipelines, and geospatial rendering that make it possible. By using CesiumJS, Camptocamp transforms complex 3D data engineering into a playful, interactive experience that invites users to feel the value of high-precision geospatial data.

GeoChallenge by Camp to Camp

“With Cesium we’re able to give players a view of their countries with such accurate terrain that many are able to recognize the spot instantly. Players aren’t just guessing coordinates; they’re exploring.” 

- Frédéric Junod, Camptocamp developer and the game’s creator

In Switzerland, Geo Challenge uses swisstopo’s high-resolution datasets, rendering every peak and valley of the country. Courtesy Camptocamp.

Camptocamp shares Cesium’s commitment to open, collaborative technology and has extensive experience building with CesiumJS. A decade ago they worked with Switzerland’s Federal Office of Topography, swisstopo, to build an interactive 3D map of the entire country using CesiumJS. They were also an early adopter of Cesium’s subsurface rendering capabilities, used to show geological features below ground. Camptocamp is a Cesium Certified Developer organization, and they continue to provide geospatial services for companies and governments in Europe.

The Swiss players in particular are intensely competitive (and very good!), with many players having near perfect scores. Courtesy Camptocamp.

To see what experiences you can create with 3D geospatial data, try out CesiumJS.

Cesium Powers Camptocamp’s Geo Challenge Game

The E1 Series is the world’s first all‑electric race boat championship, bringing together cutting‑edge engineering, global competition, and high-profile star power. With celebrity‑owned teams and events spanning iconic waterfronts from Jeddah to Monaco, the sport pairs high performance with high glamour. Its RaceBirds—ultralight carbon craft powered by a 150 kW electric motor and lifted by hydrofoils—slice across the water at speeds of up to 50 knots, showcasing the future of sustainable racing and raising awareness for marine conservation.

For such an innovative sport, it should be no surprise that E1 provides a premium digital fan experience, created by BADASS Studios using Cesium for Unreal.

BADASS uses Cesium for Unreal to build a digital replica of E1 race venues, which is used in live broadcasts. Courtesy BADASS Studios.

BADASS builds a precise digital replica of every E1 race venue in Unreal Engine to provide an accurate, large‑scale replica of the environment with event-specific markers, sponsorship markers, and more for enhanced fan experience. Courtesy BADASS.

BADASS Studios: Digital Fan Experience for E1

Building the scene with Cesium for Unreal

For each race, BADASS builds a precise digital replica of the venue in Unreal Engine, using Cesium for Unreal to bring in Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles, which provide an accurate, large‑scale replica of the environment. BADASS artists then add event-specific elements: waypoint markers, shoreline grandstands, and custom buildings along the route, as well as lighting and color adjustments for a vibrant look. They also place sponsorship overlays: a win-win that provides high visibility for sponsors without polluting the oceans and views with billboards or other debris.

Still image of an E1 Series broadcast in Monaco. Courtesy BADASS Studios.

“BADASS operate at the intersection of creativity and technology. Their team take complex data, live telemetry and, working within the constraints of live broadcast, turn them into compelling XR experiences. They are agile, solutions-focused and deeply collaborative and have quickly become an essential extension of E1's content and product function.”

- Laurence Boyd, Chief Content and Product Officer, E1

The digital replica in Unreal provides a critical resource for live broadcasts of the race. During events, BADASS receives updates from a live telemetry feed that captures boat position, lift, trim, throttle, RPMs, and more. Their platform sanitizes the data and maps it onto the digital replica so every animation, AR label, and camera angle is synchronized with what’s happening on the water. Cesium’s geospatial accuracy means AR overlays don’t rely on tracking the broadcast feed. When the environment is removed and replaced with live video, the overlays stay perfectly aligned, enabling broadcast‑quality XR even in chaotic conditions where drone restrictions, line of sight challenges, or hardware issues can disrupt traditional filming.

With all the resources available in the Unreal environment, broadcasters can provide viewers with a visually interesting and deeply informative video by cutting back and forth between a live camera feed of the race, the digital replica in Cesium for Unreal, and a hybrid AR view of the race with data on the RaceBirds’ telemetry.

BADASS provides AR overlays for broadcasts of races, like this race in Monaco. Courtesy BADASS. 

The Cesium replica of the race isn’t just for broadcasts. Fans who come to watch the E1 Series can also take part in the races themselves in a game simulator. Players pick a team and a RaceBird and try their hand at piloting through the course, using the same environment BADASS built in Cesium for Unreal to use in course explainers and live broadcasts of the race. For onsite attendees, these simulators fill downtime between races and deepen engagement. In the future, these environments will also be published as a game on Steam and other platforms, allowing fans to play at home.

“Cesium’s streaming and geospatial accuracy give us a single environment we can reuse across course explainers, AR broadcast graphics, and interactive experiences, which makes delivery faster and the output more consistent.”

BADASS Studios reuses the same Cesium for Unreal race venue for VR and AR broadcasts and for simulations. They bring their adaptable approach to multiple live events, as shown in this simulation of the FIA Extreme H World Cup in Qiddiya City, Saudi Arabia. Courtesy BADASS Studios. 

This multi-use approach—creating a single environment that can be reused in marketing, broadcasting, and games—is only possible because of Cesium’s geospatial accuracy and streaming efficiency. Such reusable content deployed in so many ways simplifies the process for E1, which can solve many needs with a single digital twin, and for BADASS, which maximizes the use of the assets it builds.

In addition to the E1 Series, BADASS Studios supports a number of events, including the FIA Extreme H World Cup, an off-road race of hydrogen powered SUVs, and FIM World Supercross Championship. With a scalable platform built on Cesium, they plan to expand into other sports and entertainment live events, giving viewers in any location an enhanced connection to real events.

To build a geospatially accurate environment you can deploy in numerous ways, try out Cesium for Unreal.

Creating an XR Connection to the E1 Series with Cesium for Unreal

Matteo Massimi is an avid mountaineer. So when he took his most recent trip to Central Asia, there was nothing unusual about the hikes. What was new was his ability to plan the expedition in the app he created with Cesium: Trailamo.

Trailamo uses CesiumJS to bring open geospatial data to mountaineers so they can plan safer, more informed routes anywhere in the world with advanced 3D terrain analysis and layered datasets.

Trailamo demo

Trailamo is built on CesiumJS and tailored to the way an explorer like Matteo, looking for off-the-map adventures, plans outdoor experiences. With a highly precise WGS84 ellipsoid and the ability to render high-quality geospatial datasets, CesiumJS gives Trailamo a solid foundation for its sophisticated terrain analysis and numerous planning tools. 

Explorers can create their own routes in Trailamo, dropping waypoints and comparing against public routes, as in this climb of the southwest face of the Matterhorn. Courtesy Trailamo.

“I’m not a software developer by training, but I knew what features I needed in the ultimate mountaineering app. So I looked for what tools were available to a noob like me, and with Cesium I could build exactly what I needed.”  

Trailamo offers global terrain and imagery for planning an outing anywhere on the planet. Beginning with Cesium World Terrain, users can then choose from a variety of imagery layers, such as topographic maps or satellite imagery. For a photorealistic view of well-known areas, they can also view global Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles.

Trailamo aggregates open data, using CesiumJS to give viewers access to public datasets for planning outdoor experiences, as in this view of Mont Blanc in the Alps from the French approach. Courtesy Trailamo.

Above this base, users can add overlays, such as live snow coverage from NASA GIBS, weather data from OpenWeather, ski pistes from OpenSkiMap, hiking trails provided by various collections of public GPX tracks, and more.

By combining terrain, imagery, and overlays, users can better understand upcoming adventures. Here hiking trails, publicly available routes, ski runs, and terrain contours are all shown with OpenTopoMap imagery draped over Cesium World Terrain at Fizkul Peak in Kazakhstan. Courtesy Trailamo.

Trailamo offers free accounts. Matteo, a strong supporter of open data, believes that high‑quality outdoor tools shouldn’t hide essential information behind steep subscription fees—especially when much of that data is generated by publicly funded government agencies as a public good. If citizens have already paid to collect it, he argues, they shouldn’t have to pay again to access it.

Terrain analysis tools, such as this calculation of avalanche angles at Aconcagua, Argentina, give adventurers a better understanding of their surroundings so they can mitigate their risk in unknown territory. Courtesy Trailamo.

Matteo has also written a number of tools for specialized terrain analysis. Because CesiumJS exposes the quantized mesh in its terrain pipeline, Matteo was able to calculate normal vectors for each triangulated surface and use that calculation to display altitude and slope gradient, avalanche angles, and terrain aspect and contours. 

Combining layers and overlays with tools can help users answer very specific questions about planned trips. In this screenshot of the Trans-Ili Alatau range in Kazakhstan, only peaks above a certain altitude are visible, and the slope gradient is colored to give a better understanding of the steepness of the terrain. Courtesy Trailamo.

Because Trailamo uses Cesium to aggregate numerous public datasets into a single app, users can combine them for better insights. This means that skiers can look at runs in their area overlayed with NASA‑collected snow coverage and check for avalanche angles in the backcountry for areas of risk. Hikers venturing into remote areas without widely published guidebooks and trails can look at the 3D terrain and overlay that with GPS tracks collected by OpenStreetMap to infer where others have traveled—quite literally following in past footsteps.

“Aggregating this open data with Cesium gives me the tools to have free outdoor experiences that would have been much more challenging, if not impossible, ten years ago. I’ve climbed new mountains because of Trailamo.” 

Matteo’s future plan is to continue to expand Trailamo’s data offerings, bringing in more open source data and allowing users to add their own open source imagery or overlays. 

To bring together the datasets you care about, sign up for a free Cesium ion account.

Planning Mountaineering Routes in CesiumJS with Trailamo

Over the last 20 years, technology and the nature of conflict have changed more rapidly than US defense policies and military procedures. To modernize and synchronize operational-level planning, Sandtable uses CesiumJS, Cesium for Unity, and Cesium ion to combine traditional military planning documents and immersive geospatial context.

For operational wargaming in the COA analysis step of the MDMP, as well as mission rehearsal, Sandtable Navigator provides a 4D environment built with Cesium for Unity. Pictured here are friendly and enemy units at the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, California, USA. Courtesy Sandtable.

For operational wargaming in the COA analysis step of the MDMP, as well as mission rehearsal, Sandtable Navigator provides a 4D environment built with Cesium for Unity. Pictured here are friendly and enemy units at the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, California. Courtesy Sandtable.

Sandtable: COA Analysis

Founded in 2024 by US Army veterans and researchers, Sandtable pairs AI with human judgment in its Mentat and Navigator prototypes to facilitate mission analysis, course-of-action (COA) development, and operational wargaming with more data, detail, and speed.

Planning, collaboration, and rehearsal tools tend to involve 2D imagery, spreadsheets, printed documents, a physical sand table, and the risks that come with putting a group of key people in the same place simultaneously. The company’s push to bring time-dynamic 3D to military planning results in interactive environments that fuse data types and sources to support planning and assessment for both human teams and autonomous systems, no matter where they are. 

During COA DEV, planners using Sandtable Mentat create, visualize, and share unit symbology, operational graphics, viewshed, and ranges of weapon systems in 4D. Courtesy Sandtable. 

“What we’re simulating and planning—like drones, counterdrone technology, and electromagnetic warfare—exists in 3D space in reality, and we need to be able to represent reality. That requires Cesium,” said Sandtable COO Brady Moore. 

And reality is complex: data comes from myriad sources, and conditions shift over time. With AI, the platform helps surface patterns, compare options, and stress-test assumptions, so commanders can focus their judgment where it matters most.

Planners drag and drop MIL STD 2525D symbols from predefined combat power data to build enemy SITEMPs and friendly COAs in Mentat. Courtesy Sandtable.

Planners drag and drop MIL STD 2525D symbols from predefined combat power data to build enemy SITEMPs and friendly courses of action in Mentat. Courtesy Sandtable.

Sandtable: Enemy SITEMPs and Friends COAs

Cesium is deployed across Sandtable’s solution to accelerate key phases of the military decision-making process (MDMP), particularly mission analysis, COA development, and rehearsal, with authoritative geospatial context and efficient data delivery:

Mentat, built with CesiumJS, incorporates written orders, concept sketches, and open datasets, e.g., for soil density and composition, on top of real-world terrain in a browser for rapidly adjusting COAs with AI.

Navigator uses Cesium for Unity for COA analysis and mission rehearsal in a shared virtual environment, wherever participants are, on a variety of devices. Instead of merely rehearsing plans produced in Mentat, Navigator feeds insights back into the planning environment—enabling continuous refinement rather than one-time execution.

Sandtable Mentat allows planners to determine which factors about the terrain are relevant to operations and visualize them together or separately. Courtesy Sandtable. 

With detailed geospatial data from Cesium ion and a range of public and government sources (for example, NOAA and USDA datasets), warfighters and autonomous vehicles know not only where hills and trees are but also microterrain features relevant to mobility and line of sight. This is important because factors like height of vegetation determine what a drone can—or can’t—see (depending on available data resolution and source quality). This data is primarily 3D Tiles, quantized mesh, and KML/KMZ, optimized, hosted, and streamed via Cesium ion for efficiency and interoperability. Cesium ion also enables Sandtable to be data agnostic, because 3D Tiles is an OGC community standard, and can use the Army's own Well Formed Format data when available. Sandtable uses Cesium ion SaaS while connected to the internet and anticipates leveraging Cesium ion Self-Hosted in future disconnected or denied environments, as well as secure enclaves.

Sandtable Mentat develops its own Modified Combined Obstacle Overlay (MCOO) using CesiumJS to visualize layers. Sandtable’s detailed datasets help determine terrain trafficability. Other terrain data includes canopy height, land use, soil attributes, slope, and elevation. Courtesy Sandtable.

Sandtable Mentat develops its own Modified Combined Obstacle Overlay (MCOO) using CesiumJS to visualize layers. Sandtable’s detailed datasets help determine terrain trafficability. Other terrain data include canopy height, land use, soil attributes, slope, and elevation. Courtesy Sandtable.

Sandtable: Modified Combined Obstacle Overlay (MCOO)

Critical to Sandtable’s work is embedding with the very people who will use the platform. During the Army’s xTechOverwatch competition in October 2025, the team tested Mentat on a tablet in the field with soldiers during the day and adjusted the capabilities and interface each night, returning the next day with an improved product. Sandtable developers were able to take feedback from concept to functional visualization and analysis in hours rather than days. This speed of development is enabled by adaptable, streaming-ready 3D Tiles and open-source runtimes. (The company’s CEO, Brian Hamilton, is a Cesium Certified Developer, and Sandtable was among the competition’s winners.)  

Watch Sandtable CTO Brent Lance’s 2025 Cesium Developer Conference talk to learn about the role Cesium plays across Sandtable’s solution for the MDMP. 

Military Planning Using Agentic AI and Simulations

Mentat and Navigator have been deemed Awardable on the Tradewinds Solutions Marketplace, making them eligible for government procurement and tightening collaboration between government and industry.

Use Cesium ion to securely fuse high-resolution imagery and terrain with unit-specific data for actionable information and collaboration. Get started with a community account.  

Author’s note: Sandtable’s COO, Brady Moore, is a former Cesium employee. 

Sandtable Modernizes and Synchronizes Military Planning with Cesium

Blenheim Palace, a UNESCO World Heritage Site and one of England’s most iconic estates, faces a monumental challenge: maintaining a 300-year-old building that welcomes over one million visitors annually, while also serving as a lived-in residence.

Blenheim Palace, a UNESCO World Heritage Site and one of England’s most iconic estates. Courtesy Blenheim Palace.

To keep up with these challenges, Blenheim Palace has invested in an IoT sensor network that monitors all sorts of data from the building, such as temperature, humidity, CO2 levels, and footfall.

The data, pouring in from over 30 platforms, became too much for their building management system (BMS) to take in and ended up siloed, often buried in folders. Maintenance teams, facing restoration costs of £4 million a year and overwhelmed by the sheer volume of data, found it nearly impossible to get a comprehensive picture of the state of the palace, let alone plan for the future.

At 300 years old, Blenheim Palace requires constant maintenance and reconstruction work. Courtesy Blenheim Palace.

That’s all changed now that they’ve developed a digital twin of Blenheim Palace, built with Cesium, that provides a single source of truth for the state of the palace. IoT sensors feed real-time alerts into a unified platform, allowing maintenance teams to visualize issues in context, plan restoration work proactively, and even receive automated notifications when environmental thresholds are breached.

Blenheim digital twin for smart conservation

Blenheim Palace’s digital twin was born with the announcement of the Cesium Design Tiler and Add-In for Autodesk Revit. The team at Blenheim saw that the 3D Tiles open standard would allow them to efficiently stream heavy Revit files into a lightweight environment, providing a frontend through which they could access all of the IoT data they were collecting.

Loaded in CesiumJS, the interactive palace model streams smoothly despite its size and complexity thanks to 3D tiling via the Cesium ion for Autodesk Revit Add-In.  Courtesy Blenheim Palace.

In partnership with the Heritage Innovation Laboratory Oxford and Oxford Brookes University, Blenheim’s team worked to make their BIM model the foundation of a digital twin. They sliced their architectural model into over 14,000 individual elements, each tied to metadata: material type, historical repairs, risk assessments, etc. Then, using the Revit add-in and the Design Tiler in Cesium ion, they tiled the model into 3D Tiles. Now with a model that retained all the detail and metadata of the original but tiled for smooth navigation, they loaded the 3D Tileset into CesiumJS.

The original palace model came from a scanned point cloud, corrected by architects and tied to floor plans. Courtesy Blenheim Palace.

With the Revit model as the frontend, the palace’s intricate structure became an interactive digital twin. The model of the palace is easy to navigate, accessible to both technical and non-technical staff. Users can filter views of the site, for example, by restoration needs deemed most urgent in a recent risk assessment.

Users can filter views of the site, for example, by restoration needs deemed most urgent in a recent risk assessment. Courtesy Blenheim Palace.

Behind the interactive model sits Blenheim’s entire IoT network. By centralizing data with Cesium and automating alerts, Blenheim Palace reduced manual oversight and enabled proactive maintenance, potentially lowering restoration costs by up to 10%.

Blenheim Palace’s digital twin has a growing database currently exceeding 150 million rows of environmental and building data, fed by IoT sensors integrated with BMS controllers. Courtesy Blenheim Palace.

Predictive maintenance guided by AI insights

The digital twin also contains archival data tied to the model. This historic view, developed by Clara Saliba, makes the model a portal to the archives, giving users access to decades of maintenance history and to machine learning models trained to identify patterns in stonefall, water ingress, and exfoliation. These machine learning models are expected to enable predictive maintenance and sustainable energy use.

“Heritage isn’t just about preserving the past—it’s about imagining its future. With Cesium ion, we turned our Revit model from a virtual replica into a digital twin of Blenheim Palace—a dynamic simulation that tracks condition and restoration data, identifies inefficiencies, predicts future needs, and transforms how we manage heritage through technology.” 

- David Green, Head of Innovation, Blenheim Palace

The digital twin isn’t just about capturing the current state of the building. The Blenheim team is using this data to reach specific goals: Blenheim Palace aims to be carbon net zero by 2027, and a precise, real-time view into the building allows them to track energy usage and optimize systems via smart controllers to meet this ambitious goal.

"The Digital Twin at Blenheim Palace has been the flagship project for the Heritage Innovations Laboratory Oxford since its inception in 2022. As soon as we began collaborating with Cesium in the winter of last year, we began making rapid progress in pursuing our collective goals of linking heritage science and digital twinning to arrive at predictive solutions for managing built heritage environments." 

- Mr. Sterling MacKinnon III, Heritage Innovations Laboratory Oxford

Future steps for the Blenheim Palace digital twin

Looking ahead, Blenheim team plans to add even more granularity to their digital twin: they’d like to slice it even further to capture more architectural details and to include household items like tapestries and furniture. They expect the model to eventually grow from its current 14,000 elements to over 50,000. In addition, they foresee being able to run frequent drone surveys of the building to provide regular updates on the state of the structure.

Blenheim Palace’s digital twin provides a model other heritage sites could use for smart conservation. Courtesy Blenheim Palace.

Blenheim’s team also built their digital twin with an eye to other heritage sites that could benefit from similar analysis. Few heritage sites around the world have the internal technical expertise that Blenheim has cultivated, and the Blenheim team has designed their digital twin to scale. They plan to develop their system into a broadly applicable platform other locations could also use, offering a model for sustainable digital conservation.

In Blenheim Palace’s digital twin, Cesium provides a spatial environment that has become the index to accessing, visualizing, and analyzing a host of data about the building. Here the palace is shown together with Cesium World Terrain and satellite imagery at its real world location. Courtesy Blenheim Palace.

To tile your own Revit models as 3D Tiles, making them streamable over the web or in runtime engines like Unreal Engine and Unity, download the add-in from the Autodesk App Store, the Cesium downloads page, or the GitHub repo.

Blenheim Palace Performing Smart Conservation with Cesium

Stoian (Boe) Andrei’s greatest passion is VR. He loves the way a headset can transport you from your room to another place. So when, at 15 years old, he saw the announcement that Google Earth data would be available in Unity via Cesium for Unity, he began developing a VR app to transport viewers anywhere on the planet. 

Neuschwanstein Castle, Germany. WorldLens allows users to explore anywhere on the planet with Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles streamed in Cesium for Unity. Courtesy WorldLens. 

WorldLens uses Cesium for Unity to stream massive geospatial datasets to lightweight hardware. Boe selected Cesium for Unity because the geospatial platform provides exclusive capabilities and customization flexibility required for the app’s performance and fidelity.

WorldLens VR

Stepping into WorldLens on Meta Quest 3 is like stepping off a satellite. Users gaze around at the stars as they float down to Earth, the world at their fingertips. And the whole world really is there to explore.

Horseshoe Bend, Arizona. With World AI, users also get personalized insights as they explore. Courtesy WorldLens.

Users plan upcoming trips, time travel through historical imagery, revisit their childhood homes, or watch the sun rise over distant mountain ranges. With features like multiplayer and street view, WorldLens helps users connect outside their own headset.

The app is more than just a viewer: Boe has integrated the Open AI API to offer AI insights wherever users may go, in any of 2,000 languages. Users can ask for a tour of Bucharest, get insights into Victoria Falls, or request help finding a better route home.

Meteora, Kalabaka, Greece. WorldLens allows explorers to examine both the natural and built environment in locations both familiar and exotic. Courtesy WorldLens.

Boe has focused his development on performance tweaks that bring high performance 3D Tiles over even limited connections to viewers around the world. Boe leaned on the Cesium community forum and his own C# expertise to push optimization to the limit, offering efficient streaming and dynamic settings that adapt to users’ connection quality and device capabilities. Even users far from Google’s servers can enjoy smooth terrain rendering and fast loading.

“The amount of advanced and exclusive optimizations available in Cesium lets WorldLens offer the best 3D quality on the market, with the most complete Google Earth experience and smoothest performance averaging > 70 fps.” 

Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada. With Cesium for Unity providing access to global datasets, users can travel to any spot on Earth and then enter Google Street View to explore the area. Courtesy WorldLens.

Cesium for Unity unlocked streaming massive datasets in hardware as light as the Quest, making experiences like WorldLens possible. To bring real world data into your app, try Cesium for Unity.

WorldLens Delivers High-Performance VR Exploration with Cesium for Unity

This year, NORAD Tracks Santa turns 70.  

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

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

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

NORAD Tracks Santa 2025

 Tracking such a magical feat requires serious coordination and cooperation.  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NORAD Tracks Santa: A Cesium-Powered Christmas Tradition 

The most costly risk to major infrastructure projects isn't bad weather or poor funding: it's the risk that slips past the constructability review. If not caught soon enough, a single contradiction—like major utility conflicts or an unworkable traffic management plan—triggers millions in wasted taxpayer funds and guarantees years of delay.  

A critical conflict revealed during constructability review: a proposed highway support column lands directly on existing railway tracks. Courtesy WSB.

Although the constructability review is the critical gatekeeper, the process is often trapped in 2D static documents. Engineering design and consulting firm WSB is using Cesium-powered geospatial capabilities in Bentley Infrastructure Cloud Connect to ensure design flaws are caught early.  

Connect provides a secure, open, and scalable environment for engineering services firms, construction firms, and owner-operators to store, manage, and share infrastructure files and data. Cesium’s integration with Connect offers a unified web experience to visualize infrastructure data in full geospatial context.  

“Civil engineering isn’t just about technical analysis—it’s also about solving geospatial challenges,” said Andy Kaiyala, vice president of digital construction management at WSB. An early adopter of Connect, Kaiyala adds “Cesium’s capabilities allow us to incorporate critical spatial information early in the process, helping us make smarter decisions about fitting infrastructure into available space while minimizing disruption.” 

Demonstration showing Cesium’s integration with Bentley Infrastructure Cloud Connect.

Demonstration showing Cesium’s integration with Bentley Infrastructure Cloud Connect.

Cesium + Bentley Infrastructure Cloud Connect

CesiumJS serves as Connect’s visualization front end, rendering massive infrastructure datasets on an interactive map that scales from a global portfolio view—covering multiple projects across regions—down to detailed, project-level insights. Engineering-grade data (such as BIM models, point clouds, and reality meshes) is efficiently streamed as 3D Tiles, the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) community standard created by Cesium.  Connect also integrates Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles, leveraging the 3D Tiles standard to provide high-resolution 3D representations of major cities and terrain. 

Apart from catching obvious errors, Cesium’s geospatial capabilities in Connect help teams uncover hidden, high-impact risks that traditional reviews miss. On a project in the southern United States, WSB quickly identified and effectively communicated a high-risk design problem:  a proposed railroad bridge and major sewer infrastructure were planned adjacent to a protected historic building, prompting a redesign before the project moved to final design —and potentially saving months in schedule delay and millions in public funds. 

Cesium-powered geospatial capabilities in Connect reveal design conflict between a proposed railroad bridge and a historic building. Courtesy WSB. 

A bottom-up view highlights further design conflict between sewer pipes and the proposed bridge pilings. Courtesy WSB.

“Cesium provides a high-performance, scalable, and geospatially accurate environment that brings full context to infrastructure project designs in Connect,” said Bill McNamara, senior director of iTwin and portal experience at Bentley. “It’s not just empowering our end users. It’s driving value across the ecosystem of infrastructure stakeholders.” 

While testing the Cesium integration with Connect, WSB shared curated views of 72 projects with over 900 external stakeholders representing 86 organizations, including state departments of transportation, rail authorities, utilities, and public agencies. “We can bring more stakeholders to the review process earlier, thanks to the intuitive way Cesium enables us to visualize project designs. It’s become a key differentiator for us,” Kaiyala explained.     

“When we show a design model with a 2D map, stakeholders nod politely,” added WSB director of digital construction management strategy Corey Johnson. “But when we show it on an interactive Cesium-powered map surrounded by Photorealistic 3D Tiles, their eyes light up. They immediately understand the proposed design and any constructability issues.” 

For WSB, visualizing engineering data in true geospatial context has elevated constructability reviews from a static checkpoint to a dynamic driver of smarter, faster, and more transparent project delivery. As more organizations adopt Cesium-powered capabilities in Connect, early detection and clear communication of design risks resolve conflicts before shovels hit the dirt. Kaiyala summed up the approach: “Ultimately, Cesium isn’t about pretty pictures; it’s about putting valuable information in the hands of the people who build the infrastructure we all rely on.”  

Sign up for a free Cesium ion account to pair your 3D models with accurate geospatial context.  

WSB Transforms Constructability Reviews with Cesium and 3D Tiles in Bentley Infrastructure Cloud Connect

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VC Solar

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

Virtual City Systems Advocates Open Source for Urban Digital Twins

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

VADE uses Cesium to mirror operational reality. Courtesy VRAI. 

Virtual All-Domain Environment (VADE) uses Cesium to mirror operational reality. Courtesy VRAI.

This Is VADE

An immersive XR platform in the works since 2021, VADE began as a proof of concept between simulation data company VRAI and the Royal Air Force for comprehensive situational awareness and could scale across Defence. VRAI announced VADE’s full release at DSEI in fall 2025. 

Real-world 3D data and live collaboration in VADE enable a common operating picture (COP) for detailed planning and faster decisions. Add XR, and troops familiarize themselves with a location before deploying. VADE can be set for individuals or in multiplayer mode, accessed via desktop app or with headsets.  

The tool’s capabilities span domains: 

For drone intervisibility studies, users can draw routes, mark waypoints at each kilometer, and determine blind spots at specific locations and heights to ensure proper placement anywhere on the globe.  

With a volumetric tool for battlespace management and deconfliction, airspace coordination via VADE is accurate and intuitive.  

High-altitude parachute insertion simulations include trackback lines for descent, giving the distance to the drop zone throughout the line; users can view the line from the aircraft or the ground, with the surroundings they can expect to see.  

Because VADE allows users to customize for NATO standards, slopes turn red if they’re not sufficient for helicopter landing sites (HLS). 

Although VADE is not a targeting tool, users can examine the impacts of explosives. 

Restricted operating zone for UAS overwatch. Courtesy VRAI.

Intervisibility study to ensure proper placement. Courtesy VRAI.

Route planning, with directional arrows and optional kilometer markers. Courtesy VRAI.

Gun target line (GTL) tool. Courtesy VRAI.

GTL and impact of explosives. Courtesy VRAI.

VADE employs Cesium World Terrain and Bing Maps Aerial imagery with Cesium for Unreal to enable users to navigate to places that matter for their missions, manipulating the time of day and simulating weather conditions, with high-fidelity rendering. When users are online, they can pull in Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles for exercises in urban areas, and Vexcel data is a boon when VADE is used as part of an airgapped solution via Cesium ion Self-Hosted.  

The VADE library includes data via Cesium ion; 3D models of aircraft, tanks, and other vehicles; NATO map marking symbols for friendly forces and enemy capabilities; and user-specific sources, like their own imagery, photogrammetry, or GitHub repos. VADE connects to users’ private Cesium ion accounts for hosting, tiling, and streaming efficiently. Using geospecific data via Cesium saves VRAI engineers and their users days of work per location and obviates the need for hand modeling or geotypical data, improving situational awareness and decision speed and reducing the cognitive burden on those tasked with complex planning and rehearsal. 

“It’s a transformative way of planning for defense. We operate in multiple dimensions—why wouldn’t we plan in multiple dimensions?” said Ant Casson, former Squadron Commander in the Royal Air Force and VRAI’s business development lead for the UK and Europe. “The possibilities are endless for VADE, enabled by the powerful tools provided by Cesium for Unreal.”

The VADE library includes 3D models of aircraft, tanks, and other vehicles. Courtesy VRAI.

VADE is dual use: in addition to its defense value, the app’s live 3D COP enables better decisions with real data for emergency services, disaster relief, critical national infrastructure planning, large event planning, and agricultural monitoring.  

Learn to integrate 3D geospatial data when clarity, confidence, and speed matter most. 

VRAI Delivers Virtual All-Domain Environment with Cesium for Unreal 

When a court case following a serious automobile accident could benefit from a visualization of the incident, attorneys turn to Forensic Rock, a Philadelphia company that creates visualizations of accident scenes using tire marks, LiDAR scans, and other physical evidence. With Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles and Cesium for Unreal, Forensic Rock delivers immersive, accurate reconstructions with speed and precision.