User Stories

The traditional method for laying out military Range Danger Area (RDA) templates involves hand-drawing traces on clear plastic over a paper map and manually submitting them for approval—they can take hours to create, must be physically delivered across stakeholders, and are prone to version-control errors. SAF-Foresight brings 3D digitization to this process, with multiple ranges overlaid on geospecific training areas in CesiumJS, cutting the time down to mere minutes, enabling singular authoritative version control, and increasing plan access to authorized app users.

The app’s comprehensive ammunition library and accurate location data are vital to range planning. Courtesy SimCentric Technologies.

SAF-Foresight's comprehensive ammunition library and accurate location data are vital to planning military live fire exercises.

SAF-FORESIGHT by SimCentric

SimCentric Technologies’ SAF-Foresight is a server-based app for planning and safety for military live fire exercises, rapidly developing, visualizing, and adjusting live fire spatial parameters in 3D. The app includes interactive planning components, markup capabilities, activity locations, automated safety analytics, target placement analysis tools, appointments, and Notifications to Airmen (NOTAMs) in this real-time common operating picture (COP). 

SAF-Foresight provides real-time 3D COPs for military live fire exercises. Courtesy SimCentric Technologies.

Not only does SAF-Foresight enable the most efficient use of training times and locations, but it also takes into account the risk profiles that can occur in live fire exercises. Real-time analytics indicating fratricide risk are modeled with alerts to key stakeholders, enabling mitigation before a catastrophic event occurs. SAF-Foresight shows if configurations are compliant or noncompliant, allowing planners to optimize their range activities and balance the competing demands of realism, concurrency of use, and safety deconfliction. Specific roles and modular tiered permissions are assigned in the app, such as coordinator, planner, and range control officer, to align with safety protocols and ensure stakeholders act within the limits of their authority. Everything in SAF-Foresight’s COP is permission controlled. 

Coordinators use SAF-Foresight for efficiency in planning training times and locations and to reduce risk among soldiers. Courtesy SimCentric Technologies.

Initially developed in 2017, SAF-Foresight has been approved for use on Australia’s Defence Protected Network; other countries are in various stages of trial, test, and acquisition. The app can be customized for national doctrine variances.

SAF-Foresight’s users can access Bing Maps Aerial imagery and Cesium World Terrain in Cesium ion and stream those datasets into CesiumJS for real-world context and details pertinent to the training events, including implications for live fire RDA templates. Cesium ion assets are coupled with GeoTIFFs from defense organizations in SAF-Foresight; the app can also use ASCII files to provide a high-fidelity 3D terrain profile. Safety distances, ricochet distances, and other similar information is stored in SAF-Foresight’s ammunition template library as a CSV file—users can add and update their own ammunition tables.

Because considerations for range safety include distances, angles, and heights, visualizing the training areas in 3D is vital for modern planners and the soldiers taking part in the training events, especially for managing terrain profiles and air movement corridors. SAF-Foresight’s 3D geospatial representation provides the full picture with intervisibility among aggregated live fire exercises across multiple doctrine types. 

Cesium ion assets are coupled with GeoTIFFs or ASCII files from defense organizations in SAF-Foresight. Courtesy SimCentric Technologies.

SAF-Foresight’s standards-based architecture enables doctrinally accurate RDAs to be scheduled, assigned to areas, and exported to relevant third-party systems for rehearsal and virtual walk-throughs in synthetic training environments.

RDAs created in SAF-Foresight can be scheduled, assigned, and exported. Courtesy SimCentric Technologies.

With Cesium ion and CesiumJS, organizations can pair their data with Cesium’s assets for geospatial context—and share it broadly or limit access for protected systems. Sign up for your own Cesium ion account.

SAF-Foresight Improves Live Fire Range Safety with CesiumJS

In some ways, Earth’s oceans are more mysterious and less explored than outer space. Terradepth is changing this with its autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) and its Absolute Ocean (AO) browser-accessible data management and analysis platform, which uses CesiumJS to visualize vast 3D models of the ocean floor.

Terradepth’s Absolute Ocean uses CesiumJS to visualize vast 3D models of the ocean floor. Courtesy Terradepth.

AO Short

Terradepth addresses both data collection and dissemination, beginning with making thousands of NOAA surveys available to all users of its AO platform, where users can see everything from the natural seabed to sunken wrecks. Terradepth also collects geospatial seafloor data using its own fleet of AUVs and partners with TCarta to add its satellite-derived bathymetry; customers are able to add their own survey data to AO, too. Terradepth announced AO in spring 2022 and launched the platform this summer.

Terradepth collects geospatial seafloor data using its own fleet of AUVs. Courtesy Terradepth.

Terradepth uploads data in BAG, GeoTIFF, JSF, LAZ, and XYZ formats to Cesium ion, where that data is stored and the point clouds are tiled as 3D Tiles. For images and grids, Terradepth uses the 2D imagery and quantized mesh outputs from the tiler. Terradepth also accesses Bing Maps Aerial imagery and Cesium World Terrain for detailed above-sea-level context. All of this is streamed into CesiumJS and shown in the AO portal, so clients can map ocean change over time and share dashboards broadly with a community or with a smaller team—to collaborate and make the best decisions with the data they have about the ocean.

“Cesium was our first choice for Terradepth's AO platform. Its open source JavaScript library jumpstarted our AO development and it has allowed us to customize our own basemap to enable a striking 3D navigable underwater environment,” said Andrew Lunstad, Terradepth’s SVP of Software.

AO users can map ocean change over time and share dashboards. Courtesy Terradepth.

AO’s power users are hydrographers, using bathymetric data to aid underwater projects for laying cable, pipelines, offshore wind farms, and others. Any organization building, navigating, or studying underwater needs to know where there are boulders, cliffs, existing infrastructure, shipwrecks, and unexploded ordnance.

Terradepth’s ocean focus is what led to its partnership with Seabed 2030, a project that aims to map the world’s entire ocean floor by 2030 via crowdsourced bathymetry and make it available to everyone. AO will be the secure platform for Seabed 2030 data contributors, enabling interactive visualizations and examining the relationships to other open-source data added to AO.

Data collected around South America and transit from South America to Antarctica and back, depicted in AO for Seabed 2030. Courtesy Terradepth.

With CesiumJS, Terradepth’s AO can provide world-class 3D maps to organizations and their survey teams in energy, telecommunications, academia, defense, and others who are exploring the watery unknown on our planet. 

Bring your undersea, terrain, and 3D data to a Cesium globe with a Cesium ion account.

Terradepth Displays Sea Floor 3D Models with CesiumJS

Building, testing, and operating spacecraft is time intensive and expensive. Unexpected results can delay launch and on-orbit operations. To aid spacecraft design and limit the risk of costly design changes, Sedaro Satellite uses CesiumJS to visualize the outputs from its cloud-scalable digital twin simulations. Sedaro Satellite simulations are a powerful tool for collaborative design, testing, and operational decision-making.

Spacecraft digital twin power subsystem analytics in Sedaro’s web browser interface. The 3D view in CesiumJS shows this wildfire satellite imaging an active wildfire in the Yucatan Peninsula. Courtesy Sedaro.

Spacecraft digital twin power subsystem analytics in Sedaro’s web browser interface. The 3D view in CesiumJS shows this wildfire satellite imaging an active wildfire in the Yucatan Peninsula.

Sedaro Satellite - CesiumJS

Sedaro has been using CesiumJS since day one, streaming in data from Sedaro’s physics engines to visualize the flight paths of spacecraft.

If this sounds familiar, it’s because that’s how Cesium got its start.

CesiumJS enables Sedaro Satellite to present an accurate, time-dynamic virtual globe and customer spacecraft data in interactive web apps. Links to analytics boards can be shared with stakeholders and collaborators and accessed via browser on any device, displaying Cesium 3D playback alongside time-series charts and statistical performance metrics.

Power system simulation playback in Sedaro Satellite. CesiumJS visualization of the spacecraft, Earth, and Sun adds context to power generation by the spacecraft solar arrays. Courtesy Sedaro.

In fact, CesiumJS is what Sedaro showed government customers and end users in its earliest days, to get Small Business Innovation Research funding. The development effort for Sedaro Satellite kicked off in 2019. The prototype started with a Python physics engine built in three weeks and made use of CesiumJS as the main element of its 3D playback and analytics capabilities. 

“What we get out of the box in open-source tools is amazing,” said Robbie Robertson, Sedaro CEO.

Cesium 3D view of a Sedaro Satellite scenario with digital twins of the entire GPS constellation. Courtesy Sedaro.

Sedaro Satellite enables engineers and technicians to build fewer physical prototypes and to integrate the distributed hardware, software, and human elements driving the engineering process. In just one spacecraft digital twin, each subsystem simulation connects and communicates with the others, mirroring the interfaces of the physical system. Spacecraft commands and software updates can be tested on the virtual model, and fixes to on-orbit faults can be approached in this same way prior to any changes deployed to the physical spacecraft. Not only does testing on a virtual model visualized in CesiumJS protect physical spacecraft, but it also creates realistic environments for training.

Custom playback interface in Sedaro Satellite's browser-based analytics. A remote sensing space vehicle is shown pointing to another digital twin in the simulation scenario: a lasercomm relay satellite. Attitude control, thermal, and power system dynamics for this vehicle demonstrate the interdisciplinary simulation made possible by Sedaro Satellite. Courtesy Sedaro.

Sedaro Satellite is Sedaro’s first product. In the near future, Sedaro will be leveraging its cloud-scalable system simulation technology to build similar products for UAVs, hypersonic vehicles, fixed-wing aircraft, and other vehicles. These domain-specific products will be interoperable, enabling users to build large multi-agent simulations that incorporate digital twins from multiple domains. A NASA or military mission, for example, might make use of both aircraft and spacecraft, and Sedaro will deliver the capability to create a simulation to concurrently assess the performance of both systems. Sedaro sees a future role in a metaverse-type environment used for engineering, as it delivers the engineering physics analog to gaming physics engines.

A digital twin of a radar satellite is shown pointing to a ground station in Alaska for downlink alongside live widgets indicating the flight software logic state and active operational mode of the satellite. Courtesy Sedaro.

There are two ways of delivering Sedaro Satellite: a multi-tenant SaaS solution, expected in the first quarter of 2023, and an enterprise solution for deploying a dedicated instance. The beta went live in August 2021, and 30 organizations are currently using the platform. Customers include the U.S. Space Force, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and a number of academic and commercial spacecraft developers. 

Are you a developer working with CesiumJS? Check out our code examples, documentation, and tutorials.

Sedaro Satellite Visualizes Spacecraft Digital Twins in CesiumJS

Military teams on frontlines often do not have access to information updated at the same rate as those at headquarters, but it’s often those teams that need immediate insights. Squads rely on Reveal Technology’s Farsight app for accurate and timely 3D models, enabling them to access relevant and actionable intelligence in disconnected or limited-bandwidth environments. To optimize rendering, Farsight uses 3D Tiles—an open specification created by Cesium for streaming massive heterogeneous 3D geospatial datasets and adopted as an Open Geospatial Consortium community standard.

3D model of an urban center in Idlib, Syria, in Reveal’s Farsight app. Courtesy Reveal Technology.

Reveal Technology’s Farsight software, released in fall 2020, enables teams in the field to collect and analyze data via standard Department of Defense inventory unmanned aircraft systems and end-user devices like smartphones and tablets. Farsight Mobile uses full-motion video from UAS to generate 2D maps in real time; then, from the same footage, it generates 3D models as 3D Tiles. Farsight Node does the same in an enterprise environment, and Farsight Edge does this processing onboard the UAS to deliver a 3D model straight from the drone without the need to consume raw FMV, reducing network load. Prior to Farsight’s availability, creating 3D models in challenging environments was time intensive and high effort.

With Farsight, operators access 3D map data and AI features to make vital decisions in the field. Courtesy Reveal Technology.

Reveal Technology’s Farsight app uses 3D Tiles to optimize rendering for accurate and timely 3D models for squads in the field.

Farsight by Reveal Technology

Farsight previously employed generic .obj model formats. When a user would zoom in, however, the 3D model did not adjust; the resulting view was blurry. 3D Tiles enable Farsight users to explore areas of interest in greater detail and complexity without slowing down operations. 3D Tiles support rapid map creation and interoperability with various viewers, enhancing situational awareness and collaboration. 

Using the Vertical Measurement Tool, Farsight users measure length, height, and diagonal from a specific point. This 3D model shows a city in Ukraine. Courtesy Reveal Technology.

Squads use Farsight to visualize and analyze in ways specific to their missions, including viewsheds, helicopter landing zones, and measurements. Farsight’s AI features and optimized 3D geospatial data enable evaluations of friendly and enemy points of view, changing tactical plans on the fly, and coordinating seamlessly to make better decisions faster.

Tackle the hardest problems in 3D geospatial with Cesium.

Farsight Strengthens Mission Planning with 3D Tiles

With Cesium, OnePlan is offering comprehensive planning tools to event organizers. The Official Supporter of GIS Mapping and Digital Twin Software for the Olympic and Paralympic Games Paris 2024, OnePlan has supported more than 8,000 events in over 100 countries. The Formula 1 British Grand Prix, the Triathlon Federation, FIBA, and numerous other sport federations have used OnePlan.

OnePlan allows organizers to plan all the logistics for their event in a CesiumJS app. 

The strength of OnePlan’s software is offering a single event planning solution, built on CesiumJS. Starting with a view of the venue, organizers build out their plan for the event, including the logistics of infrastructure, crowd management, security, marketing, and ticketing. 

Once the plan is developed, they can analyze and export the plan for vendors, staff, and volunteers. By consolidating the planning into a single, virtual tool, OnePlan provides better collaboration between teams for safer, better organized events.

Up-to-date high resolution imagery, from satellite data or Nearmap, gives event organizers a clear canvas to begin planning the traffic flow and infrastructure needed at an event.

Users create their entire event plan through a CesiumJS view. They begin with high resolution imagery of the site, giving them an accurate picture of the venue. They can then build out their plans for the site by importing CAD models of the venue, including for multi-story buildings. With the existing infrastructure in place, organizers add on plans for the event by drawing perimeters and adding drag and drop structures such as picnic tables or icons for common resources like restrooms or lost and found.

Event organizers can import CAD models of the venue and drag and drop furniture, signage, and icons to create a detailed plan for hosting the event.

With these visual tools, organizers can plan for needed infrastructure, such as tents and portable restrooms, for crowd control by placing fencing and barriers, and for traffic management by placing temporary traffic signals and arranging parking spaces. OnePlan’s capacity calculators help plan for appropriate crowds, and their analytics tools will calculate the number of barriers needed based on a user-defined area.

With capacity calculators, users can select an area and crowd density to calculate how many visitors can be permitted in the area. 

OnePlan Capacity Caluclator

Users can also enter metadata for each item placed on the map, such as vendor name, cost, power details, and in-and-out date, as well as a what3words location, tied to a 3 meter square that provides more precise location information than an address.

Objects placed in OnePlan can be tied to metadata, including a what3words location. 

OnePlan also supports multiple time stamps so users can plan for each stage of an event. 

OnePlan’s tools are designed for sharing. The software will calculate the number of barriers needed on a drawn perimeter, furniture pieces to be ordered, or staff expected on site. Those and other calculations can be exported to create a Bill of Quantities or a report for each participating vendor. 

OnePlan uses what3words for geocoding, allowing more precise output from an event design so it’s easier to set up the event accurately.

Laying out traffic routes and parking spots in OnePlan.

OnePlan is just one of many organizations building digital twins with Cesium. See how Cesium is being used to create digital twins in a broad range of industries. 

OnePlan and Cesium Delivering Geospatial for Events

Australia-based company IMMERSIV uses Cesium for Unreal to take the guesswork out of both the real estate buying and selling processes with a virtual display showroom. This digital interactive experience allows buyers to visualize how a new development will look along with its environment and surroundings, plus internal features and layouts. Developers use it as a single project space for marketing content, eliminating the need to dig through multiple platforms for vital information.

Using Cesium for Unreal, the IMMERSIV app shows the Imperial Square project on Australia’s Gold Coast; it will be the tallest building in the Southern Hemisphere. Courtesy IMMERSIV.

Co-founders Christian Schwerdtfeger and Clint Motley noticed the typical route to market involved artist-created 3D rendered images, aerial imagery, and floor plans. Instead of sharing these individually, IMMERSIV provides a 3D geospatial project ecosystem as a web-accessible one-stop shop. Cesium helps real estate solution providers combine data, visualization, and analytics for meaningful information.

IMMERSIV acquires photogrammetry of the area local to a project from aerial footage from its own drone or from Aerometrex, one of Cesium's favorite companies to work with. IMMERSIV hosts its high-resolution data in Cesium ion, where it is tiled into 3D Tiles and streamed into Unreal Engine. This provides a clear, accurate picture of the land and surrounding areas, with the real-world locations of infrastructure, transportation, shopping, and other amenities.

This aerial view in the IMMERSIV app uses Cesium World Terrain with the Bing Maps overlay via Cesium ion. Courtesy IMMERSIV.

Schwerdtfeger and Motley designed IMMERSIV to bolster project marketing for their clients.

“We built IMMERSIV to be able to utilize the incredible datasets within Cesium and import the data into Unreal Engine. This allows buyers to immerse themselves in the project as they see 360-degree views and level vantages, examine changes in natural light at different times of day, and experiment with swapping custom facets in the homes,” said Schwerdtfeger.

The lifelike interiors of the projects are created with Autodesk 3ds Max and exported to UE4 and into the IMMERSIV platform. IMMERSIV models and textures the interiors, and some furniture assets are purchased from the UE Marketplace. The interiors and exteriors are separate scenes; users can click to move inside or outside.

Immersive, all-encompassing 3D projects enable trust and transparency for buyers and developers. Courtesy IMMERSIV.

Immersiv uses Cesium for Unreal to take the guesswork out of both the real estate buying and selling processes with a virtual display showroom.

Immersiv Virtual Showrooms

“The breadth of projects being realized include high-rise apartments, master-planned house and land communities, and retail precincts by some of the country’s largest developers,” Motley said of the demand for the company’s architectural project solutions.

IMMERSIV’s virtual showroom is not only for display in offices. Using PureWeb, IMMERSIV streams its Unreal-based app from the cloud, so anyone with a link can experience these interactive walkthroughs smoothly on any device. 

“The ability to showcase high-resolution, low-latency, fully immersive experiences to a global reach is testament to our software partners continually striving to enhance the customer experience for buying property,” said Schwerdtfeger.

IMMERSIV’s interactive project ecosystem also includes real-time for-sale and sold information, providing the full picture to developers, sales teams, and buyers.

Bring interactivity and transparency to your development projects with Cesium for Unreal.

IMMERSIV Creates Virtual Showrooms with Cesium for Unreal

Geospatially enabling sensors, things, and robots to interact across a common 4D space with geographic precision and accuracy, in a way humans can make sense of, is no small feat. OpenSensorHub makes it possible to connect these various systems and transform them into seamlessly integrated, spatiotemporally enabled, interoperable environments capable of addressing mission or business needs. The OSH team selected CesiumJS as its default viewer because of its time-dynamic object visualization over high-resolution 3D terrain data.

Primarily based on the Open Geospatial Consortium’s Sensor Web Enablement standards, OSH was released in 2014 as an open source, open-standards-based platform for bringing together nearly any sensor system as a location-enabled, geographically aware, web-accessible service. Since then, OSH has come to support a wider array of devices, including things (as in the Internet of Things) and robots. Botts Innovative Research, Inc, performs R&D services around OSH, and GeoRobotix provides the commercial SaaS offering. 

The OSH team works with its community and customers to build “OSH drivers” to connect devices, integrating their data in a single collaborative visual environment with CesiumJS. OSH also provides training info for community members to develop their own OSH drivers. 

OpenSensorHub builds drivers to connect sensors, robots, and things and integrate their data. Courtesy OSH.

OSH works with sensors of all phenomenologies. Electro-optical, infrared, multispectral, hyperspectral, synthetic aperture radar, acoustic, lidar, radar, CBRNE, and radio frequency are just a few that OSH drivers convert to Sensor Model Language for common sensor discovery, geolocation, processing, visualization, and tasking. CesiumJS enables OSH customers to bring together this disparate sensor data and visualize it in one high-precision web-accessible 4D common operating picture. 

Using CesiumJS, OSH’s customers can view and analyze their geospatial data on handheld devices or on a big screen in a command center. The OSH Web Client Toolkit also enables users to build visualization environments from multiple time-synchronized instances of CesiumJS, related time-synchronized charts, graphs, and sensor data visualizations, as well as synchronized 2D + time instances of OpenLayers, Leaflet, MapBox, and Esri mapping interfaces for decision-support solutions.

In this demo from I/ITSEC 2021 and GEOINT 2022, OSH uses CesiumJS in its OSH Web Client Toolkit to visualize the location, status, and disposition of sensors over time on a Maxar Precision3D 3D Surface Model of an urban training center in the 3D Tiles Next format. Users can see the sensor feeds from an unmanned aircraft system and a static camera, in addition to how they're arrayed in the real world across time.

In this demo from I/ITSEC 2021 and GEOINT 2022, OpenSensorHub uses CesiumJS in its OSH Web Client Toolkit to visualize the location, status, and disposition of sensors over time on a Maxar Precision3D 3D Surface Model of an urban training center in the 3D Tiles Next format. Users can see the sensor feeds from an unmanned aircraft system and a static camera, in addition to how they're arrayed in the real world across time.

OpenSensorHub Demo Using CesiumJS

OSH’s ability to integrate space-based, airborne, mobile, in situ, and terrestrial remote sensors of all types into a common 4D space has proven useful to customers from localities implementing smart cities to major airlines and the Department of Defense. Pairing OSH’s capabilities with CesiumJS has proven essential to command decisions in each of those environments, as CesiumJS is fed with real-time sensor data from OSH. OSH’s ability to also archive sensor data historically, and to replay synchronized data streams into CesiumJS, enables decision-makers to review past scenarios to better inform future decisions.

CesiumJS is free and open source. Download CesiumJS and bring a high-precision WGS84 globe to your app.

OpenSensorHub Connects Military Internet of Things with CesiumJS

Established more than 50 years ago, the University of Stuttgart’s Institute for Photogrammetry focuses on photogrammetry, remote sensing, geoinformatics, and computer vision. IFP uses Cesium frequently as it presents data to other professionals, shares supplemental academic information, and bolsters student learning.

Data is being collected and shared faster and more easily than ever—satellites of all sizes orbit our planet, and even our phones come equipped with lidar scanners. With access to this immense amount of data comes the ability to make critical decisions by using and analyzing it. It is IFP’s mission to make sense of this data and provide it to experts across fields.

IFP visualizes a large point cloud captured by a drone. This data is publicly available as a classification benchmark. Courtesy IFP.

The researchers at IFP spend their days working with complex 4D data, including point clouds and meshes with attributes that can’t be analyzed in static images. Often the datasets are very large and vary in formats—and customers, decision-makers, and the public can’t be expected to have and know how to use the specialized tools IFP employs. Instead, IFP uploads massive, disparate datasets to Cesium ion, where they are stored and optimized as 3D Tiles. Then IFP streams the 3D Tiles in CesiumJS, which the institute uses to create web portals for stakeholders to access and explore the data. Researchers know the data is properly located on a WGS84 globe, and stakeholders can view it in a browser on any device.

IFP presents this persistent scatterer, derived from synthetic aperture radar data, on 3D city models to experts and decision-makers for risk assignment. Courtesy IFP.

Because the Cesium visualizations are interactive and shareable, IFP researchers can direct readers to them as supplements for figures presented in their academic papers as well. 

Groups of persistent scatterers from SAR interferometry, linked to structural building elements, along with their deformation time series. Courtesy IFP.

In IFP’s Master of Science in Geomatics Engineering program, students learn to use Cesium and other tools to visualize spatial data. The SLAM Integrated Mobile Platform, for example, integrates a laser scanner, GNSS antenna, and remote-controlled vehicle to perform simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) and georeference the results. (Our readers can try out IFP students’ SIMP Viewer and take a look at the documentation on GitHub.) Using Cesium in their studies enables students to learn 3D geospatial data visualization in a hands-on way and be prepared for working with massive heterogeneous datasets in their future endeavors.

The SIMP Viewer is entirely student-built. Courtesy IFP.

Are you incorporating Cesium in your lessons or research? Try Cesium ion with a free account.

Institute for Photogrammetry Enhances Research with Cesium

Communicating the plans and outcomes for property developments can be surprisingly challenging. While developers and their consultant teams create and understand the detailed site plans and drawings they need to work from, these technical 2D documents often don’t provide information in a way that investors, local government, and neighbors need to understand a proposed project.

V2i uses Cesium for Unreal to communicate development plans in a dynamic, 3D environment. 

v2i LendleaseCaseStudy 0002

V2i is aiming to change all that with Cesium. Whereas most development decisions are currently made based on static 2D descriptions in a process that too often leads to misunderstandings and frustration, V2i seeks to present these concepts using a common visual language in an immersive, 3D, real time world so everyone can easily understand an outcome, ask relevant questions, and make informed decisions faster.

Using Cesium for Unreal, V2i creates custom visualizations of planned development projects in Unreal Engine. 

Using Cesium for Unreal, V2i creates 3D visualizations of planned development projects. Rather than waiting to create a beautiful rendering until after all of the design work has been done, they’re striving to present a vision of the outcome from the very beginning. Their work is part of the global digital transformation in AEC, as the industry moves toward embracing visual literacy and a common visual language.

Rather than waiting to create a beautiful rendering until after all of the design work has been done, V2i is making property development 3D from day one.

V2i’s visualizations and project outcomes are detailed and immersive. Using high resolution photogrammetry data of the existing area, together with sketches and CAD drawings, they create custom visualizations and targeted solutions of planned projects. By bringing in Cesium World Terrain from Cesium ion, they’re able to place planned developments in the correct space so that all of the visualizations appear on the actual site. This accuracy allows them to do analysis of the development on the fly, such as shadow analysis.

By presenting design concepts with a common visual language, V2i makes it easier for anyone to easily understand the planned outcome.

They also take advantage of many of the rendering possibilities in Unreal Engine to give a better sense of realism: they place bikes on bike paths, waves in the ocean, and even pelicans along the waterfront. With the 3D environment based in the cloud, project leaders can share a proposal with their stakeholders, even on mobile, in an intuitive environment.

With Cesium World Terrain in Cesium for Unreal, V2i can place development projects in their accurate, real-world location.

There’s another advantage to using Cesium for Unreal: global context. The global scale available through Cesium for Unreal means that if the government is planning a new highway, it can view the entire length, across any terrain, in a single application. Or an energy company with holdings around the world can view all of its sites in a single place. That global picture is possible only with Cesium.

Cesium for Unreal is an important element of Unreal Engine's AEC ecosystem, bringing the real world to design concepts. 

V2i’s vision is to make development projects and the process more equitable and meaningful by making it more accessible. That means breaking down data silos and bringing different data formats about planned projects together into an interactive, intuitive space that is accurate and 3D from day one in an output that anyone can access and understand.

Bringing better visualization tools to the beginning of the development process and improve decisions, reduce changes, and speed up consensus. 

To get started with real world terrain for your own AEC application in Unreal Engine, check out our Cesium for Unreal Quickstart Guide. 

V2i Using Cesium for Unreal to Visualize and Improve the Property Development Process

Air Force Research Lab’s OpenDIS plugin for Unreal Engine is now available as open source on the Unreal Marketplace and on GitHub for Unreal Engine 4.27. Support for Unreal Engine 5 is coming soon.

GRILL's plugin uses OpenDIS for sending and receiving DIS data in Unreal Engine.

The GRILL has developed a plugin for sending and receiving DIS data in Cesium for Unreal

AFRL GRILL DIS for Unreal Engine

AFRL’s Gaming Research Integration for Learning Lab (GRILL) is using the Cesium for Unreal plugin to visualize their DIS training simulations on the high accuracy WGS84 globe provided by the Cesium for Unreal plugin and on global terrain and imagery available through Cesium ion. With both commercial and government off the shelf gaming technology, GRILL builds tools for simulations that support operational efficiency and effectiveness.

To add even deeper and more expansive modeling and simulation capability to Unreal Engine's visually realistic environments, GRILL created an open source plugin that allows a user to interface with DIS.

Networking options presented in the AFRL GRILL OpenDIS plugin.

DIS stands for Distributed Interactive Simulation. It's a protocol created by the Simulation Interoperability Standards Organization (SISO) defined in a set of IEEE standards. DIS is one of the most widely used protocols in the US DOD, NATO, and other allied nations for real time simulations.

DIS works as a standardized approach to connecting simulations using a series of messages with specific formats that contain detailed information about individual players in an exercise. With DIS, simulations send a group of agreed-upon messages back and forth to each other over a network, which tell other simulations where the various things (called entities) in their own simulations are located, what they are, and what they're doing. If they're moving the entities will have a speed, and their location will change over time. Information about the current state of each entity is passed in a message. The various messages that can be sent not only tell movement and location, but also define the interactions between entities such as fire, detonation, Identification Friend or Foe, and emissions, among other things. It creates a common language so that simulations can work together in time.

OpenDIS is an open source implementation of the DIS protocol. OpenDIS is an effort to create a full implementation of the DIS protocol in Java, C++, Python, JavaScript, Objective-C, and C#. The project uses a BSD-style open source license and is developed mainly by the MOVES Institute at the US Naval Postgraduate School.

Visit Unreal Marketplace to get the plugin. 

In 1979, Unit 2 at Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, partially melted down. Developer Radiointeractive is using Cesium to develop TMI: America's Chernobyl as an interactive 3D game exploring fictional outcomes after the partial meltdown.

This still from the game’s main menu depicts Three Mile Island as it was in 2019, during permanent shutdown and ongoing decommissioning.

The focus of the game is the Three Mile Island power station, which users can explore inside and out. Players take on the role of a control room operator during a blackout in 2003, tasked with stopping another meltdown at TMI. The game is being created by fusing multiple datasets, all hosted and tiled into 3D Tiles on Cesium ion. Radiointeractive is pulling in datasets of Three Mile Island and the surrounding area from Pennsylvania Spatial Data Access to Cesium ion and using the Bing Maps Aerial imagery available in the platform.

The main scan of the power station was created by an artist as an add-on for Microsoft Flight Simulator and then converted into .fbx/.obj for importing it into Unreal Engine. Radiointeractive is using blueprints from the 1970s and assets from the UE Marketplace to recreate the inside of the plant. 

Cesium for Unreal enables Radiointeractive to replace the original model’s flat, nonspecific terrain and imagery with an accurate depiction of the area, showing both aerial and ground views of the island and enabling first- and third-person views for players to immerse themselves in the history of the power plant.

The game features accurate aerial and ground views of Three Mile Island.

Radiointeractive plans to release the game on Steam and GameJolt in fall 2022.

How are you using real-world data in your immersive experiences? Get foundational skills to create your own Cesium for Unreal project.

Exploring Three Mile Island in Cesium for Unreal

LUUCY is offering tools built on CesiumJS for urban development and city planning with a focus on Switzerland. Development in urban areas can be complex, with many stakeholders of diverse backgrounds. 

With Cesium, LUUCY provides greater transparency from planning to realization so all stakeholders, whether investors, business owners, construction teams, or government officials, can collaborate on future development projects.

Sketches created in the app allow stakeholders to quickly explore a proposed development from all angles. These are intended for early in the development process, and not as a replacement to a CAD program.

LUUCY is meant to be used at a preliminary stage of planning as several variants of a feasibility study can be easily sketched within a few minutes. These visualizations are meant to inspire the imagination, support communication, and aid in the decision-making process.

Proposing alternate designs for a development area in the optional sketch shading mode. Users can model different buildings with many variations and compare them on the fly both visually and statistically.

Users can also create presentations to share with other stakeholders. LUUCY automatically flies to the individual locations of the slides and switches the desired layers on or off, not requiring the user to know how to navigate a 3D environment. 

LUUCY is designed for interactive views from any device and for large multi-screen presentations to invite comment on planned development. 

The core of the app is a 3D model of the real world with representative buildings, topography, and vegetation. 

The flexibility of the Cesium framework allows for a wide variety of different and highly detailed data to be visualized at the same time, with good performance. 

Beginning with that canvas, users create their own building sketches with simplified modeling tools and can connect to external data services, including Cesium ion assets, web map services, or self-hosted content. Upload functionality offers integration of detailed BIM models, GIS datasets, or site plans. If a dataset is not georeferenced, the user can place it with the built-in Georeferencer App, powered by MapTiler.

Providers can integrate many different data types thanks to Cesium's versatility, including detailed underground structures.

Existing buildings, trees, or other objects can be hidden so users can construct their own buildings or volumes on already developed plots. Custom-built shaders like high-quality screen space ambient occlusion and custom edge shaders also enhance the display possibilities and quality.

With the open source API, LUUCY can be extended with integrations such as construction cost estimates in early design stages.

In the LUUCY marketplace, apps, maps, and 3D data are ready to be integrated into users’ workspaces with just a few clicks.

By making it easier to visually communicate proposed designs, LUUCY makes it easier to explore all aspects of proposed development, including mobility, ecology, energy efficiency, and public spaces. 

Public presentation of visualization of zoning parameters. 

By giving users tools to quickly view, sketch, and share 3D datasets, LUUCY is using Cesium to improve workflows and decision making. To get started building your own CesiumJS app, sign up for a free Cesium ion account. 

LUUCY Providing Better Urban Planning and Site Development with CesiumJS

The Air Force Research Lab’s Gaming Research Integration for Learning Lab (GRILL) is using Cesium for Unreal to visualize DIS training simulations. Through utilizing commercial and government off the shelf gaming technology, the GRILL builds the technology for serious games that support operational efficiency and effectiveness.

The GRILL has developed a plugin for sending and receiving DIS data in Cesium for Unreal.

These geospecific training simulations rely on the high accuracy WGS84 globe provided by the Cesium for Unreal plugin and on global terrain and imagery available through Cesium ion. With the world in place, the GRILL can take advantage of the visualization capabilities of Unreal Engine. On top of the capabilities provided by both Cesium for Unreal and Unreal Engine itself, the GRILL created a plugin that allows a user to interface with DIS.

External DIS entities being captured and displayed over Project Anywhere. All 3D models and widget visuals are for demo purposes and not part of the plugin. 

The GRILL’s plugin uses Distributed Interactive Simulation (DIS), IEEE standard 1278.1 that defines, down to the bit level, the packet structure for distributed simulation environments. The DIS open standard enables real-time wargaming and is one of the most widely used protocols in defense for real-time modeling and simulation. To bring DIS into Unreal Engine, the GRILL utilized Open-DIS, the free, open-source implementation of DIS maintained by the military’s Naval Postgraduate School. 

Some of the networking options supplied by the GRILL’s DIS plugin.

The GRILL’s plugin provides basic UDP socket support and handles interpreting of DIS network traffic using the Open-DIS libraries. Then, the plugin uses the interpreted DIS data to create and update user specified DIS entities in Unreal Engine. The DIS plugin provides an interface for a user to add on custom functionality when specific DIS data is received. The GRILL’s plugin also supports sending DIS information through utilizing the Open-DIS libraries, which allows DIS data to be sent out of Unreal Engine to other DIS-capable simulations.

DIS entity with path enabled showing dead reckoning smoothing.

The plugin has not been released publicly yet, but will be released publicly in May 2022 for Unreal Engine 4.27. Support for Unreal Engine 5 will come soon after.

We’ll be sharing a demo of the work by the GRILL team at GEOINT this week. Come by our booth (#1011) to check it out.

AFRL’s GRILL Bringing DIS into Cesium for Unreal for Simulations

It's humanity’s closest experience to bird flight. Hang gliding pilots ride prone in midair, just a simple metal frame and fabric wing keeping them afloat. They may be towed aloft, but can even launch by foot off a high point. 

Freeflight Experience offers hang gliding flights in VR.

As thrilling as the sport may be, preparing for a safe flight requires thorough training, as pilots must overcome their natural instinct to pull back at the feeling of nothing underfoot. To meet this training need, Thomas Low and Cloudbase Game Labs have just released Freeflight Experience, a new VR hang gliding flight simulator built with Cesium for Unreal. 

All of the imagery in this video is from the Freeflight Experience, created using Cesium for Unreal. 

The lines are blurring

Freeflight Experience allows users to take hang gliding flights in VR, with a realistic world of high resolution global imagery and Cesium World Terrain streamed from Cesium ion. Users can travel anywhere in the world and set the time and date for a simulated flight, controlling the sun position and length of the day. 

Fully 3D volumetric clouds, soaring birds, and AI controlled fellow hang gliders add to the realism of the experience. 

Freeflight Experience is more than just a realistic setting, though. The simulation includes realistic physics that models not only glider aerodynamics, but also atmospheric physics and the formation of thermals and other lift sources. The atmospheric model in Freeflight Experience is based on historical sounding measurements from any day and location. 

Developed by an aeronautical engineer with 48 years and more than 4,000 hours of hang gliding experience, the Freeflight Experience blends ultra-realism with accessible game play. 

In the simulator, users will find windsocks that respond to the passage of thermals to help them correctly time a launch. There are also daily thermal cycles, where ground heating begins at sunrise, builds during the day, and mellows in the late afternoon.

Users can analyze their flights with the audio-visual variometer, which displays altitude, instantaneous and average climb or descent rate, temperature, time of day, and airspeed.

Wearing their VR headset, users can choose to sit in a chair holding the controllers, or they can be suspended in a real hang gliding harness, using a “control bar,” the A frame that pilots use to steer their gliders.  

In recent decades, the hang gliding sport has been somewhat in decline as potential new participants have turned to paragliding and other activities. To fill the training gap of an aging community, Freeflight Experience is designed to supplement the training of new pilots and to allow experienced pilots to hone their skills or maintain those skills when practicing isn’t possible due to seasonal weather. 

As beautiful and fun as the Freeflight Experience is, the ultimate goal of the app is to inspire players to get out of the game and pursue the sport in real life as they experience the beauty, challenges, and thrills of the original extreme sport.

To get started building your own game experience with real world data, check out our Cesium for Unreal tutorials. 

With the computing precision of our aerospace heritage, Cesium is a go-to platform for visualizing simulations. When users can see a simulation, such as the flight path of an autonomous vehicle, on a globe with accurate terrain and imagery, they’re better able to understand and analyze the data. 

MSBAI is working to make the simulations themselves easier to set up. They’ve developed a “Universal Interface for Simulation” called GURU. Today, engineers who are capable of taking advantage of simulation software spend at least months training in each one, and it takes them hours to set up one new simulation. GURU is an autonomous system built to minimize the setup time for everyone, and expand the user base by making it easier to do. The GURU interface runs on a broad range of devices from desktops to laptops to mobile. It’s modular, giving the user the control and visualizations they need for their application - like Cesium for globe view!